Odd Thomas Quotes

So many things in my continuing education are learned by going where I have to go and doing what I have to do. Therefore, my only answer is: I guess I'll find out.

~ Dean Koontz

When I was no longer of the world, I would miss its extravagant beauty. I would miss the complex and charming layers of subterfuge by which the truth of the world's mysteries were withheld from us even as we were tantalized and enchanted by them. I would miss the kindness of good people who were compassionate when so many were pitiless, who made their way through so much corruption without being corrupted themselves, who eschewed envy in a world of envy, who eschewed greed in a world of greed, who valued truth and could not be drowned in a sea of lies, for they shone and, by the light they cast, they warmed me all my life.

~ Dean Koontz

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invisible, we have a daily darkness that is night, and we encounter another darkness from time to time that is death, the deaths of those we love, but the third and most constant darkness is with us everyday, at all hours of every day, is the darkness of the mind, the pettiness and meanness and hatred, which we have invited into ourselves, and which we pay out with generous interest.

~ Dean Koontz

When you laugh at yourself, you gain perspective. Then you realize that the mistakes you made, as long as they didn't hurt anyone but yourself——well, you can forgive yourself for those.

~ Dean Koontz

You are reformed, you may be a better man, but you are not a different man. How can you convince yourself of such a thing when you are so conversant with the theology of your faith? From one end of this life to the other, you carry with you all that you have done. Absolution grants you forgiveness for it, but does not expunge the past. The man you were still lives within you, repressed by the man you have struggled to become.

~ Dean Koontz

Such grief might be to them quite delicious, a delicacy.

~ Dean Koontz

The less I have, the less I can lose.

~ Dean Koontz

Virtue is imaginative, evil repetitive.

~ Dean Koontz

My imagination is as rich as my bank account is empty.

~ Dean Koontz

We were friends, never paramours. A lover who is enigmatic will most likely prove to be a cataclysm waiting to happen. But a charming friend whose usual warmth is raveled through moments of cool inscrutability can be an intriguing companion.

~ Dean Koontz

In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

~ Dean Koontz

In all our lives, however, there are many days when we die a little, when we are wounded by loss or failure, or by fear, or by seeing the suffering of others for whom we are able to offer only pity, for whom we are powerless to offer aid, we are beyond mercy.

~ Dean Koontz

You can't fix things with a hug, but you can't make them any worse either.

~ Dean Koontz

Beauty that steals the heart is often imperfect, suggests grace and kindness, and inspires tenderness more than it incites lust.

~ Dean Koontz

I was like a thought slipping through the fissures...

~ Dean Koontz

That stormy day in the desert, however, much changed for me. We must have our goals, our dreams and we must strive for them. We are not gods, however; we do not have the power to shape every aspect of the future. And the road the world makes for us is one that teaches humility if we are willing to learn.

~ Dean Koontz

In eighty-six years, child, I've learned the world is a far more mysterious place than most people realize and that every moment of life is woven through with meaning.

~ Dean Koontz

When we hope, we usually hope for the wrong thing.We yearn for tomorrow and the progress that it presents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?Or we yearn for yesterday, for what was or what might have been. But as we are yearning, the present is becoming the past, so the past is nothing but our yearning for second chances.

~ Dean Koontz

She has suffered so much, and that sorrows me. But she has been strong in the face of unthinkable adversity, and that inspires me.

~ Dean Koontz

I was the worst kind of fool. When I look back on that August night, changed forever by all my wounds and all my suffering, that undamaged Odd Thomas seems like a different human being from me, immeasurably more confident than I am now, still able to hope, but not as wise, and I mourn for him.

~ Dean Koontz

Her stare was direct and unwavering, full of confidence earned from painful experience...

~ Dean Koontz

...because wonder admits to the existence of mystery, and the recognition of mystery in the world allows the possibility of Truth.

~ Dean Koontz

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.

~ Dean Koontz

To protect the innocent, to avoid being one of Burke's good men who do nothing, you have to accept permanent scars that cincture the heart and traumas of the mind that occasionally reopen to weep again.

~ Dean Koontz

Darkness doesn't fall at a predictable schedule. Darkness can overwhelm you any time of the day, as you know well.

~ Dean Koontz

There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way.

~ Dean Koontz

She is a girl who feels things strongly, and though cynics might mock her for that, I never will, as it is perhaps the best of graces: to feel deeply, to care profoundly.

~ Dean Koontz

Not immediately able to proceed, I stood there, inexpressibly grateful that my life, for all its terrors, is so filled with moments of grace.

~ Dean Koontz

In twenty-one years, I have not considered changing to Todd. The bizarre course of my life suggests that Odd is more suited to me, whether it was conferred by my parents with intention or fate.

~ Dean Koontz

These days, all I ask of Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another. This is a big request to make of busy Fate, who has billions of lives to keep in constant turmoil.

~ Dean Koontz

These days, all I ask Fate is that the people she hurls into my life, whether they are evil or good, or morally bipolar, should be amusing to one degree or another.

~ Dean Koontz

Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its desires...

~ Dean Koontz

Small-town boy meets big-time evil.

~ Dean Koontz

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth.

~ Dean Koontz

Not everything that happens during the day is an open portending a good or evil development in the future, but everything has meaning to one degree or another, for the world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth. The breadth of Creation makes it impossible for us to step back far enough to see the story that the tapestry tells; the intricacy of it, from the macro to the micro to the subatomic, make sit impossible for us to comprehend the megatrillions of connections between the threads in just one small fragment of the whole.

~ Dean Koontz

...guilt is deserved only when the effort to resist evil is never made.

~ Dean Koontz

Evil never dies. It just changes faces.

~ Dean Koontz

The uniqueness of every soul is not a theme that our current culture, obsessed with group identities, cares to assert.

~ Dean Koontz

But the line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern

~ Dean Koontz

Every day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on sighs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.

~ Dean Koontz