Dean Koontz Quotes

264 Sourced Quotes

The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness is an opportunity for a lost and selfish heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls

Dean Koontz
I need those nukes, the chief said. I need them, I need them right now. I don't want to be an enabler, sir. I'd rather get you into a twelve step program to help you break this addiction.

Dean Koontz
In a clutch or a corner, I tend to make a weapon out of what is near at hand. That can be anything from a crowbar to a cat, though if I had a choice, I would prefer an angry cat, which I have found to be more effective than a crowbar. Although weaponless, I left the house by the back door, with two chocolate-pumpkin cookies. It's a tough world out there, and a man has to armor himself against it however he can.
Odd Thomas speaking

Dean Koontz
As an attorney, I assure you the law isn't a line engraved in marble, immovable and unchangeable through the centuries. Rather… the law is like a string, fixed at both ends but with a great deal of play in it — very loose, the line of the law — so you can stretch it this way or that, rearrange the arc of it so you are nearly always — short of blatant theft or cold-blooded murder — safely on the right side. That's a daunting thing to realize but true.

Dean Koontz
What sucks the worst is... this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can't. We try, but we can't.

Dean Koontz
What makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection.

Dean Koontz
How can you hope to win against goddamn time travelers? It's like playing blackjack when the dealer is God. … Come to think of it, all of life is a blackjack game with God as the dealer, isn't it? So this is no worse.

Dean Koontz
We can approach belief from an intellectual path, but in the end, God must be taken on faith. Proofs are for things of this world, things in time and of time, not beyond time.

Dean Koontz
Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.

Dean Koontz
Any drunk who has tried to put his car where a lamppost stands is a self-educated physicist.

Dean Koontz
There are days when it seems to me that in literature the most convincing depiction of the world in which we live is to be found in the phantasmagorical kingdom through which Lewis Carroll took Alice on a tour.

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
Each smallest act of kindness, reverberates across great distances and spans of time —affecting lives unknown to the one who's generous spirit, was the source of this good echo. Because kindness is passed on and grows each time it's passed until a simple courtesy becomes an act of selfless courage, years later, and far away. Likewise, each small meanness, each expression of hatred, each act of evil.

Dean Koontz
A short-order cook, just off work, makes easy tracking for lions and worse

Dean Koontz
One of those librarians who rules the stacks with an intimidating scowl, whispers quiet sharply enough to lacerate the tender inner tissues of the ear, and will pursue an overdue-book fine with the ferocity of a rabid ferret.

Dean Koontz
"They can hopscotch around us," Chris told Laura. They can pop ahead in time to see where we show up, then they pick and choose the easiest place along the time stream to ambush us. It's sorta like… if we were the cowboys and the Indians were all psychic."

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
Hope is the destination that we seek.
Love is the road that leads to hope.
Courage is the motor that drives us.
We travel out of darkness into faith.

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
But once an idea for a novel seizes a writer...well, it's like an inner fire that at first warms you and makes you feel good but then begins to eat you alive, burn you up from within. You can't just walk away from the fire; it keeps burning. The only way to put it out is to write the book.

Dean Koontz
It was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.

Dean Koontz
From time to time, I do consider that I might be mad. Like any self-respecting lunatic, however, I am always quick to dismiss any doubts about my sanity.

Dean Koontz
Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.

Dean Koontz
We are an arrogant species, full of terrible potential, but we also have a great capacity for love, friendship, generosity, kindness, faith, hope, and joy.

Dean Koontz
Thanks to the circus between my ears, I can seize upon the smallest disquieting observation and from it extrapolate a terror of cataclysmic proportions.

Dean Koontz
More to the point, I know why soldiers, home from war, seldom tell their families about their exploits in more than general terms. We who survive must go on in the names of those who fall, but if we dwell too much on the vivid details of what we've witnessed of man's inhumanity to man, we simply can't go on. perseverance is impossible if we don't permit ourselves to hope.

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 signs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.

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 wives of Spartans are the secret pillars of the world."—Odd Thomas

Dean Koontz
She says what holds their marriage together is that she feels too damn sorry for him to ask for a divorce.

Dean Koontz