Top 500 Dean Koontz Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “The mild wind made the trees sway gently, in a lullaby rhythm, and the resultant susurration was like the soft sighs and dreamy murmurs of a thousand peacefully slumbering children.”

— Dean Koontz

253. “We are the most alive and closest to the meaning of existence when we are most vulnerable, when experience has humbled us and has cured the arrogance which, like a form of deafness, prevents us from hearing the lessons that this world teaches.”

— Dean Koontz

254. “I believe in the possibility of miracles but, more to the point, I believe in our need for them.”

— Dean Koontz

255. “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

256. “The stakes were suddenly so high that we wanted out of the game. When you’re playing poker with the devil, however, no one leaves the table before he does.”

— Dean Koontz

257. “What will happen will happen. There is time for miracles until there is no more time, but time has no end.”

— Dean Koontz

258. “Writing isn’t a source of pain. It’s psychic chemotherapy. It reduces your psychological tumors and relieves your pain.”

— Dean Koontz

259. “But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.”

— Dean Koontz

260. “Fear is a hammer, and when the people are beaten finally to the conviction that their existence hangs by a frayed thread, they will be led where they need to go.”

— Dean Koontz

261. “Maybe I’m needy, neurotic, paranoid. Under the circumstances, of course, if I weren’t needy, neurotic, and paranoid, I’d obviously be psychotic.”

— Dean Koontz

262. “Life was like the ice on an early-winter pond: more fragile than it appeared to be, riddled by hidden fractures, with a cold darkness below.”

— Dean Koontz

263. “Power is living while others inevitably perish. Power is cool indifference to their suffering. Power is taking nourishment from the deaths of others, just as the mighty redwoods draw sustenance from the perpetual decomposition of what once lived, but lived only briefly, around them. This is also part of the philosophy of Edgler Foreman Vess.”

— Dean Koontz

264. “There’s sometimes a weird benefit to having an alcoholic, violent father. He really motivated me in that I never wanted to be anything like him.”

— Dean Koontz

265. “Rub-a-dub-dub. Cerebrum in a tub.”

— Dean Koontz

266. “Houses are not haunted. We are haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves, our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.”

— Dean Koontz

267. “The recognition of pain and fear in others give rise in us to pity, and in our pity is our humanity, our redemption.”

— Dean Koontz

268. “Home was not a perfect place. But it was the only home they had and they could hope to make it better.”

— Dean Koontz

269. “The wisdom of the most sagacious ancient Greeks, the wisdom of the most perceptive rabbis of ancient Canaan, and all the parables of Christ teach us to believe not in justice, but in truth. In a world of rampant lying, where so many lies are used to inflame passions and justify false grievances, the indiscriminate pursuit of justice leads sooner or later to insanity, mass murder, and the ruin of entire civilizations.”

— Dean Koontz

270. “I am no theologian. I would not be surprised, however, if Heaven proved to be a cozy kitchen, where delicious treats appeared in the oven and in the refrigerator whenever you wanted them, and where the cupboards were full of good books.”

— Dean Koontz

271. “I try not to spend too much time on partisan politics. Life’s too short for that. I don’t really believe that there have been many human problems solved by politics.”

— Dean Koontz

272. “While I like people, I do also like being alone in a room and seeing what you can do with a particular theme or subject.”

— Dean Koontz

273. “I’ve since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.”

— Dean Koontz

274. “The truth was stranger than the official fiction.”

— Dean Koontz

275. “Imagine that you are more than nothing. Evil made you, but you are no more evil than a child unborn. If you want, if you seek, if you hope, who is to say that your hope might not be answered?”

— Dean Koontz

276. “Astragalomancy was a method of divining the future or learning hidden knowledge by rolling dice. A ceromancer dropped melted wax into cold water and interpreted the figures thus produced. Halomancy required the reading of the shapes made by casting a handful of salt on a flat surface. A necromancer sought answers by communicating with the dead.”

— Dean Koontz

277. “In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe. If we alow ourselves to be enchanted by the beauty of the ordinary, we begin to see that all things extraordinary.”

— Dean Koontz

278. “No degree of prosperity can be sufficient to eliminate all misfortune, and sloth is impervious to opportunity.”

— Dean Koontz

279. “If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that’s more than just entertainment-w hich is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.”

— Dean Koontz

280. “Vladimir Nabokov said the two great evils of the 20th century were Marx and Freud. He was absolutely correct.”

— Dean Koontz

281. “Death lies dormant in each of us and will bloom in time.”

— Dean Koontz

282. “I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can’t make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.”

— Dean Koontz

283. “Sorrow is not a raven perched persistently above a chamber door. Sorrow is a thing with teeth, and while in time it retreats, it comes back at the whisper of it’s name.”

— Dean Koontz

284. “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

285. “Alliteration seems to offend people.”

— Dean Koontz

286. “The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it, and the cold void between the stars speaks its language. To that savage self, evil can look lovely in too little light.”

— Dean Koontz

287. “What year these events transpired is of no consequence. Where they occured is not important. The time is always, and the place is everywhere.”

— Dean Koontz

288. “Every expression of desired friendship has potential bite. Every smile reveals the teeth.”

— Dean Koontz

289. “In misfortune lies the seed of future triumph.”

— Dean Koontz

290. “Every writer has his own voice. Other than that I’m always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven’t always been happy about that.”

— Dean Koontz

291. “Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.”

— Dean Koontz

292. “Sometimes the heart makes decisions the mind cannot, and though we know that the heart is deceitful above all things, we know that at rare moments of stress and profound loss it can be purged pure by suffering.”

— Dean Koontz

293. “People couldn’t bear to go on living if they faced every cold truth about themselves.”

— Dean Koontz

294. “Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human beings...”

— Dean Koontz

295. “No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disagreement, and frustration as is the relationship you have with a good dog. Few human beings give of themselves to another as a dog gives of itself.”

— Dean Koontz

296. “Whatever happens here, trust your heart. It’s as true as any compass.”

— Dean Koontz

297. “When we love someone, we’re held hostage by fate, because if we lose that person, then we, too, are lost.”

— Dean Koontz

298. “Small-town boy meets big-time evil.”

— Dean Koontz

299. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousands of them. So when I try to tell one of my own, I sometimes go down an alleyway when I should take the main street, or if the story is fourteen blocks long, I sometimes start on block four and have to backtrack to make sense.”

— Dean Koontz

300. “The stairs creaked. They always creaked when creaking could lead to your death, and they never creaked when creaking didn’t matter. The universe is anthropic, meaning that its design makes possible and sustains intelligent life, especially human beings. Nevertheless, I perceive some power, some presence, some adversary behind the scenes that by countless devices subtle or blunt seeks to destroy us.”

— Dean Koontz