Dean Koontz Quotes

264 Sourced Quotes

Behind every closed door might wait a thief of minds and a collector of souls.

Dean Koontz
Dogs invite us not only to share their joy but also to live in the moment, where we are neither proceeding from nor moving toward, where the enchantment of the past and future cannot distract us, where a freedom from practical desire and a cessation of our usual ceaseless action allows us to recognize the truth of our existence, the reality of our world and purpose--if we dare.

Dean Koontz
Those who wish to punish the current and future generations for the inequities of a generation long gone, and who equate justice with revenge, are the most dangerous people in the world.

Dean Koontz
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.

Dean Koontz
Writing isn't a source of pain. It's psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.

Dean Koontz
The true nature of the world was weirder than any bizarre fabric that anyone might weave from the warp and weft of imagination's loom.

Dean Koontz
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.

Dean Koontz
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.

Dean Koontz
We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which we must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness and despair.

Dean Koontz
Of all the things we can feel with our minds and bodies, severe pain is the purest, for it drives everything else from our awareness and focuses us as perfectly as we can ever be focused.

Dean Koontz
People couldn't bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.

Dean Koontz
Recognizing the structure of your psychology doesn't mean that you can easily rebuild it.

Dean Koontz
Blizzards, floods, volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes: They fascinate because they nakedly reveal that Mother Nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us.

Dean Koontz
The rain wasn't the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wringing out a filthy mop.

Dean Koontz
I thought of you as my guardian, Einstein… you taught me that I'm your guardian, too, that I'm Travis's guardian, and he is my guardian and yours. We have a responsibility to stand watch over one another, we are watchers, all of us, watchers, guarding against the darkness. You've taught me that we're all needed, even those who sometimes think we're worthless, plain, and dull.

Dean Koontz
It's so damn hard to bloom… to change. Even when you want to change, want it more than anything in the world, it's hard. Desire to change isn't enough. Or desperation. Couldn't be done without… love.

Dean Koontz
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.

Dean Koontz
The less depth a belief system has, the greater the fervency with which its adherents embrace it. The most vociferous, the most fanatical are those whose cobbled faith is founded on the shakiest grounds.

Dean Koontz
Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Dean Koontz
Every human being has appetites difficult to control but far fewer have humility, gentleness, and an awareness of their weaknesses.

Dean Koontz
The things we worry about the most are never the things that bite us. The sharpest teeth always take their nip of us when we are looking the other way.

Dean Koontz
No degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.

Dean Koontz
We need to laugh at the irrationality of evil, for in doing so we deny evil's power over us, diminish its influence in the world, and tarnish the allure it has for some people.

Dean Koontz
I would not cry. I do not cry. How bitter do you risk becoming by swallowing too many tears?

Dean Koontz
It is human nature to want to believe in the wizardry of the magician--but also to turn against him and to scorn him the moment that he commits the slightest error that reveals his trickery. Those in the audience are embarrassed to have been so easily astonished, and they blame the performer for their gullibility.

Dean Koontz
This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.

Dean Koontz
In the belly of Leviathan... one can either despair and perish, or be cheerful and persevere.

Dean Koontz
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.

Dean Koontz
Creating a family in this turbulent world is an act of faith, a wager that against all odds there will be a future, that love can last, that the heart can triumph against all adversities and even against the grinding wheel of time.

Dean Koontz
Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.

Dean Koontz