Dean Koontz Quotes

No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself. I also suspect that we cherish dogs because their unblemished souls make us wish - consciously or unconsciously - that we were as innocent as they are, and make us yearn for a place where innocence is universal and where the meanness, the betrayals, and the cruelties of this world are unknown.

~ Dean Koontz

When we make our own misery we sometimes cling to it even when we want so bad to change, because misery is something we know. The misery is comfortable.

~ Dean Koontz

Change isn't easy. Changing the way you live means changing the way you think, means changing what you believe about life. That's hard.

~ Dean Koontz

Fate isn’t one straight road…there are forks in it, many different routes to different ends. We have the free will to choose the path.

~ Dean Koontz

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.

~ Dean Koontz

In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it were seldom rewarded and were often punished.

~ Dean Koontz

What doesn't quicken dies. That's an indisputable truth of life.

~ Dean Koontz

You won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.

~ Dean Koontz

Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be, but truth cannot be crafted. Truth is, and truth has a way of astonishing us to our knees. Reminding us, that the universe does not exist to fulfill our expectations. Because we are imperfect beings who are self-blinded to the truth of the world’s stunning complexity, we shave reality to paper thin theories and ideologies that we can easily grasp – and we call them truths. But the truth of a sea in all it’s immensity cannot be embodied in one tidewashed pebble.

~ Dean Koontz

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's interpretation is equally valid, more important than the author's intention. In fact, nothing in life has meaning. Reality is subjective. Values and truths are subjective. Life itself is a kind of illusion. Blah, blah, blah, let's have another scotch.

~ Dean Koontz

People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children.

~ Dean Koontz

Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.

~ Dean Koontz

You can con God and get away with it, Granny said, if you do so with charm and wit. If you live your life with imagination and verve, God will play along just to see what outrageously entertaining thing you'll do next.

~ Dean Koontz

Of course, in the process, you must never do harm to others in any serious way, or you'll cease to amuse Him. Then payment comes due for promises you didn't keep.

~ Dean Koontz

My parents didn't raise me to ask God for blessings or benefits. For guidance, yes. For the strength to do the right thing, yes. Not for a winning lottery number, not for love or health, or happiness. Prayer is not a gimme list; God isn't Santa Claus.

~ Dean Koontz

For the likes of you, the path to happiness is one mean son of a bitch of a path.

~ Dean Koontz

No one can grant you happiness. Happiness is a choice we all have the power to make.

~ Dean Koontz

Home was not a perfect place. But it was the only home they had and they could hope to make it better.

~ Dean Koontz

Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?

~ Dean Koontz

What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.

~ Dean Koontz

For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret...It is a word...the word hangs on a silver chain. The word is HOPE.

~ Dean Koontz

Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.

~ Dean Koontz

When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to make the most of life in spite of the limitations of age and disease, their calm awareness of the approaching end when their final hours come. They accept death with a grace that I hope I will one day be brave enough to muster.

~ Dean Koontz

A man begins dying at the moment of his birth. Most People live in denial of Death's patient courtship until, late in life and deep in sickness, they become aware of him sitting bedside.

~ Dean Koontz

The dead are merely the countrymen of my future.

~ Dean Koontz

That is, Jack thought, the way of life. The horror changes us, because we can never forget. Cursed with memory. It starts when we're old enough to know what death is and realize that sooner or later we'll lose everyone we love. We're never the same. But somehow we're all right. We go on.

~ Dean Koontz

Being alone can be good. It's easy to find peace alone. But sometimes, being alone is a king of death.

~ Dean Koontz

How obvious can it be? ... The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is just a synonym for death.

~ Dean Koontz

To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.

~ Dean Koontz

The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.

~ Dean Koontz

the divine has taken a few steps back from humankind, perhaps in revulsion, perhaps because we don't deserve to look directly upon holy beings anymore.... When the divine enters the world these days from outside of time, it manifests discreetly through children and animals.

~ Dean Koontz

Money and beauty are defenses against the sorrows of this world but neither can undo the past. Only time will conquer time. The way forward is the only way back to innocence and to peace.

~ Dean Koontz

Sometimes waiting is the hardest thing.

~ Dean Koontz

In this world only the paranoid survive.

~ Dean Koontz

She was fascinated with words. To her, words were things of beauty, each like a magical powder or potion that could be combined with other words to create powerful spells.

~ Dean Koontz

In a book, even the real bastards can't hurt you. And you can never loose a friend you make in a book. When you get to a sad part, no one's there to see you cry. Or wonder why you don't cry when you should.

~ Dean Koontz

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.

~ Dean Koontz

Then what are you? An electronic Hannibal Lector? You can't eat my liver with fava beans through a modem, you know.

~ Dean Koontz

I am the One, and I see all.But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are all human beings, even those with functioning eyes. They are blind to their folly, to their ignorance, to their history, to the future that they will make for themselves. A future born of self-loathing.

~ Dean Koontz

In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance.

~ Dean Koontz