Dean Koontz
There’s just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It’s not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it’s that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don’t see what you wish to see—or glimpse something that you wish weren’t there.Collection: Eye
What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.Collection: Miracle
A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between hermit and bitter misanthrope.Collection: Lines
Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have.Collection: Simple
The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar. -Odd Thomas - Odd Apocalypse by Dean Koonts pgs. 354-355 chapter 53Collection: Lying
With blue vinyl-tile floor, pale-green wainscoating, pink walls, a yellow ceiling, and orange-and-white stork-patterned drapes, the expectant fathers' lounge churned with the negative energy of color overload. It would have served well as the nervous-making set for a nightmare about a children's-show host who led a secret life as an ax murderer. The chain-smoking clown didn't improve the ambience.Collection: Children
What looks tragic might be comic on second consideration, and what is comic might bring tears in time.Collection: Tears
If God is an author and the universe is the biggest novel ever written, I may feel as if I'm the lead character in the story, but like every man and woman on Earth, I am a suporting player in one of billions of subplots. You know what happens to supporting players. Too often they are killed off in chapter 3, or in chapter 10, or in chapter 35. A supporting player always has to be looking over his shoulder.Collection: Character
Fate cannot be sidestepped or outrun.Collection: Fate
The problem with movies and books is they make evil look glamorous, exciting, when it's no such thing. It's boring and it's depressing and it's stupid. Criminals are all after cheap thrills and easy money, and when they get them, all they want is more of the same, over and over. They're shallow, empty, boring people who couldn't give you five minutes of interesting conversation if you had the piss-poor luck to be at a party full of them. Maybe some can be monkey-clever, some of the time, but they aren't hardly ever smart.Collection: Depressing
Are you prepared for the first wound?Collection: Firsts
Inaction counted as a choice.Collection: Choices
Alliteration seems to offend people.Collection: People
A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worseCollection: Order
Loneliness comes in two basic varieties. When it results from a desire for solitude, loneliness is a door we close against the world. When the world instead rejects us, loneliness is an open door, unused.Collection: Loneliness
Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.Collection: Thinking
When things are baffling they usually don't unbaffle themselves.There's just, you know, a certain amount of baffling stuff that always, like, really baffles you, and I've found that it's best to accept bafflement whenever it comes along, and then move on.Collection: Life
Britney: You in a fight? Odd: No, It's an employment-related fork wound.Collection: Fighting
The word impossible contains the word possible' What's that-- some Zen thing?' I think Star Trek. Mr. Spock.Collection: Stars
What year these events transpired is of no consequence. Where they occured is not important. The time is always, and the place is everywhere.Collection: Years
Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.Collection: Lying
I've got evil in me as much as anyone, some desires that scare me. Even if I don't give in to them, just having them scares the living bejesus out of me sometimes. I'm no saint, the way you kid about. But I've always walked the line, walked that goddamned line. It's a mean mother of a line, straight and narrow, sharp as a razor, cuts right into you when you walk it long enough. You're always bleeding on that line, and sometimes you wonder why you don't just step off and walk in the cool grass.Collection: Mother
This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.Collection: Eden
Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own imageCollection: Reflection
Always, beneath every apparent chaos, order waits to be revealed.Collection: Order
When social forces press for the rejection of age-old Truth, then those who reject it will seek meaning in their own truth. These truths will rarely be Truth at all; they will be only collections of personal preferences and prejudices.Collection: Truth
The world needed a little Evil, so Good had something to compare itself to, but you couldn't let it think it had the right-of-way on the road and an invitation to dinner.Collection: Thinking
All but universally, human architecture values front elevations over back entrances, public spaces over private. Danny Jessup says that this aspect of architecture is also a reflection of human nature, that most people care more about their appearance than they do about their souls.Collection: Reflection
When it came to formal classes, I was a slacker. But I've always been a diligent autodidact and can teach myself virtually any subject if I have a serious interest in it.Collection: Class
Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.Collection: Pieces
Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.Collection: Self
No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.Collection: Love
I can do what I need to do. I can get where I want to go, no matter how hard it is.Collection: Needs
This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.Collection: Dog
My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty.Collection: Love
Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.Collection: Reality
If I waited until I felt creative, I would never have had a career. I long ago learned that a day that starts out badly, when nothing comes out on the page or comes out wrong, can suddenly turn into a good day a few hours later, when suddenly everything starts to click. The brain can be cajoled into being creative.Collection: Good Day
Dogs are one of those things that make you happy and make you wonder.Collection: Dog
Every world has dogs or their equivalent, creatures that thrive on companionship, creatures that are of a high order of intelligence although not the highest and that therefore is simple enough in their wants and needs to remain innocent. The combination of their innocence and their intelligence allows them to serve as a bridge bewtween what is transient and what is eternal, between the finate and the infinate.Collection: Dog
As individuals, as families, as neighbors, as members of one community, people of all races and political views are usually decent, kind, compassionate. But in large corporations or governments, when great power accumulates in their hands, some become monsters even with good intentions.Collection: Gratitude
The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.Collection: Dream
The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know.Collection: Knows
It may sound strange, but when you're a kid and you're in that environment, for some reason for a long time you think, when the doors are closed in other houses, this is what it's like everywhere. And then at some point you begin to realize that isn't true, and books were really the educational system that showed me that there were many better and different ways to live a life.Collection: Educational
What popped up more than that was the realization that I made as an adult that the world is this incredibly complex, layered, and mysterious place and if you stop and think about it the human cell is literally more complex than a fleet of 747s.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Lying
Loss is the hardest thing, I said. But it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.Collection: Teacher
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.... The problem is finding smile-inducing evil people, because the evil are the most humorless, though in the movies they frequently get some of the best lines.Collection: Fate
He was sure that he was not the cause of the abrupt silence. His passage through the canyon had not previously disturbed either birds or cicadas. Something was out there. An intruder of which the ordinary forest creatures clearly did not approve. He took a deep breath and held it again, straining to hear the slightest movement in the woods. This time he detected the rustle of brush, a snapping twig, the soft crunch of dry leaves-and the unnervingly peculiar, heavy, ragged breathing of something big.Collection: Breathing