Dean Koontz
When new hopes fail, old hopes return in the endless cycle of desperation.Collection: Return
Unreason is an essential medicine as long as you do not overdose.Collection: Medicine
Life's mysterious, strange, and full of wonders - and only a fool withdraws from it willingly and lets it pass him by.Collection: Fool
If Edgar Allan Poe were alive today, his agent would be constantly slapping him upside the head with tightly rolled copies of his brilliant short stories and novelettes, yelling, 'Full-length novels, you moron! Pay attention! What's the matter with you -- are you shooting heroin or something? Write for the market! No more of this midlength 'Fall of the House of Usher' crapCollection: Fall
Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.Collection: Self
We live in God's amusement park.Collection: Amusement
Despair is good. Despair can be the nadir of one life and the starting point of an ascent into another, better one.Collection: Despair
Your sense of responsibility to others can never be excessive.Collection: Responsibility
In this uncertain space between birth and death, especially here at the end of the world in Moonlight Bay, we need hope as surely as we need food and water, love and friendship. The trick, however, is to remember that hope is a perilous thing, that it's not a steel and concrete bridge across the void between this moment and a brighter future. Hope is no stronger than tremulous beads of dew strung on a filament of spider web, and it alone can't long support the terrible weight of an anguished mind and a tortured heart.Collection: Heart
If your work is deathwork, one weapon is not enough, just as a plumber would not answer an urgent service call with a single wrench.Collection: Answers
I'm either a mutant or a cripple, and I refuse to be a cripple. People pity cripples, but they're afraid of mutants [...] Fear implies respect.Collection: People
In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph.Collection: Lying
A plot without action is like pasta without garlic, like Dolly Parton without cleavage, and like a writer without his similes.Collection: Writing
Acting is a marvelous profession ... If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character and motivations.Collection: Motivation
One man's idea of perfect order is another man's chaos.Collection: Men
Love and sausage are alike. Can never have enough of either.Collection: Funny
Nearly everything that was fun, of course, was also a little dangerous: riding roller coasters, skydiving, gambling, sex.Collection: Sex
People couldn't bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.Collection: People
Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.Collection: Friendship
Ignorance isn't bliss, but sometimes ignorance makes it possible for us to sleep at night.Collection: Ignorance
Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.Collection: Life
I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?Collection: Risk
Experts must read the patterns and judge their usefulness as evidence. Under any of numerous pressures, an expert may wish to misread a pattern or even to alter it. Americans had a touching trust in "experts".Collection: Judging
In a world that daily disconnects further from truth, more and more people accept the virtual in place of the real, and all things virtual are also malleable.Collection: Real
Where there's cake, there's hope. And there's always cake.Collection: Cake
When a knot gets to tight, you can always cut the ropeCollection: Cutting
Most people tend to think the best of those who are blessed with beauty; we have difficulty imagining that physical perfection can conceal twisted emotions or a damaged mind.Collection: Beautiful
You won't find the truth of life in morbidity, only in hope.Collection: Morbidity
There's no use wasting are energy being afraid of the devils, demons and things that go bump in the night... Because ultimately we'll never encounter anything more terrifying than the monster among us. Hell is where we make it.Collection: Fear
Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the only things from this world that we could hope to see in the next.Collection: Friendship
The functions of intellect are insufficient without courage, love, friendship, compassion and empathy.Collection: Compassion
All human lives are so profoundly and intricately entwined-those dead, those living, those generations yet to come-that the fate of all is the fate of each, and the hope of humanity rests in every heart and in every pair of hands.Collection: Heart
Lies hurt people; imagination makes life more fun.Collection: Hurt
Fear is a poison produced by the mind, and courage is the antidote stored always ready in the soulCollection: Soul
Every eye sees its own special vision; every ear hears a most different song. In each man's troubled heart, an incision would reveal a unique, shameful wrong.Collection: Love
I survive by finding the sweet spot between reason and unreason, between the rational and irrational.Collection: Sweet
When a liar became too skilled at deception, he could lose the ability to discern truth, and could himself be more easily deceived.Collection: Liars
Envy, envy eats them alive. If you had money, they’d envy you that. But since you don’t, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren’t happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.Collection: Daughter
Nothing is worse than being alone on the evening of the day when one's cow has exploded.Collection: Cows
That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duties good friends and families performed for one another! They tended the flame of memory, so no one’s death meant an immediate vanishment from the world; in some sense the deceased would live on after their passing, at least as long as those who loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weapon against the chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some continuity from generation to generation, an order of endorsement and meaning.Collection: Memories
As long as I have laughter, I am not without hopeCollection: Laughter
Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself.Collection: Dog
Life had not taught me to distrust ministers, but it had taught me to trust no one more than dogs.Collection: Dog
I am my own worst enemy. This, more than any other trait, proves my fundamental humanity.Collection: Life
When tempest tossed, embrace chaosCollection: Literature
Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.Collection: Real
Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was solitude, the ideal condition for reflection, even a kind of freedom. Once you were thus convinced, you were foolish to open the door and let anyone in, not all the way in. You risked the hard-won equilibrium, that tranquility that you called peaceCollection: Loneliness
Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.Collection: Adventure
Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows.Collection: Pain