Top 160 John Connolly Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The US dollar is our currency but your problem.”

— John Connolly

2. “The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another’s pain as one’s own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.”

— John Connolly

3. “Drowning men will drag you down if you let them. Sometimes, to survive, you have to let them sink.”

— John Connolly

4. “For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.”

— John Connolly

5. “You can’t prove that something doesn’t exist. You can only prove that something does exist.”

— John Connolly

6. “No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself.”

— John Connolly

7. “He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another’s fear to animate it.”

— John Connolly

8. “In any given situation, the most difficult step is to reach a decision. Once a decision is made, control can be asserted.”

— John Connolly

9. “Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they’re criminals. If they weren’t criminals, they’d be doing something else to screw up people’s lives, like running elections in Florida.”

— John Connolly

10. “Books are constantly changing the world. If you’re a Christian, you have been changed by the Bible, by the word of God, or what was left of it when it was finally wrung through the hands of men. If you are a Muslim, look to the Koran; if a Communist, to Marx and Engels. Don’t you see? This world is constantly being altered by books.”

— John Connolly

11. “The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.”

— John Connolly

12. “Each man dreams his own heaven.”

— John Connolly

13. “War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will still fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.”

— John Connolly

14. “Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end.”

— John Connolly

15. “They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren’t entirely sure that this was a good thing.”

— John Connolly

16. “Here is a truth, a truth by which to live: there is hope. There is always hope. If we choose to abandon it, our souls will turn to ash and blow away.”

— John Connolly

17. “Look at you,” he said. “A fractured man, a broken thing. I asked for money to kill you, but none would give it. Now I understand why. There is no value to you. You’re nothing, and therefore nothing is what your life is worth. But I will kill you anyway, out of pity.”

— John Connolly

18. “You must learn to control your impulses,” he said. “A sword wants to be used. It wants to draw blood. That is why it was forged, and it has no other purpose in the world. If you do not control it, then it will control you.”

— John Connolly

19. “Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You.”

— John Connolly

20. “Came from nothing- less than nothing, because the poor always enter this life with their account in deficit, and generally leave it in much the same condition...”

— John Connolly

21. “He had a love of books, for in books was recorded the knowledge of all those who had gone before him.”

— John Connolly

22. “In the end, we’ll all face oblivion.”

— John Connolly

23. “Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.”

— John Connolly

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

24. “After all, what is hell but the eternal absence of God? To exist in a hellish state is to be denied forever the promise of hope, of redemption, of love. To those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography.”

— John Connolly

25. “There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one’s humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.”

— John Connolly

26. “What’s seldom is wonderful.”

— John Connolly

27. “You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.”

— John Connolly

28. “He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick – if “trick” was the right word – was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to.”

— John Connolly

29. “Luck ran out, but smart was for life.”

— John Connolly

30. “I don’t think you can dial 911 for a literary emergency.”

— John Connolly

31. “In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory.”

— John Connolly

32. “He understood the half-life of hope: it is not despair that destroys us, but its opposite. Hope is the winding, despair the unwinding. Despair brings with it the possibility of an ending. Taken to the extreme, its logical conclusion is death. But hope sustains. It can be exploited. Ormsby.”

— John Connolly

33. “Being scared isn’t the problem. It’s not running away that’s the hard part.”

— John Connolly

34. “But the measure of a man was the degree to which he was prepared to inconvenience himself for what was right;.”

— John Connolly

35. “But some gifts are worse than curses, and the dark side of the gift is that they know. The lost, the stragglers, those who should not have been taken but were, the innocents, the struggling, tormented shades, the gathering ranks of the dead, they know. And they come.”

— John Connolly

36. “You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted by what has been done in its name.”

— John Connolly

37. “It never paid to underestimate children.”

— John Connolly

38. “This life is filled with threats and danger, David. We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for the greater good, even at risk to ourselves, but we do not lay down our lives needlessly. Each of us has only one life to live, and one life to give. There is no glory in throwing it away where there is no hope.”

— John Connolly

39. “Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt.”

— John Connolly

40. “You did it because you wanted to. No one can make you do evil. You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.”

— John Connolly

41. “But there was a saying in Hebrew, “We survived Pharoah, we’ll survive this too.” In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they failed, so let’s eat!”

— John Connolly

42. “If you listen hard enough, there’s almost no such thing as silence: there’s just noise that isn’t very loud yet.”

— John Connolly

43. “They listen, the dead. They’re always listening. What else is there for them to do?”

— John Connolly

44. “He had quite liked the dwarfs. He often had no idea what they were talking about, but for a group of homicidal, class-obsessed small people, they were really rather good fun.”

— John Connolly

Featured in: Fun Quotes

45. “And David saw himself reflected in the Woodsman’s eyes, and there he was no longer old but a young man, for a man is always his father’s child no matter how old he is or how long they have been apart.”

— John Connolly

46. “God would even have forgiven Judas Iscariot, had he asked for His forgiveness. Judas wasn’t damned for betraying Christ. He was damned for despairing, for rejecting the possibility that he might be forgiven for what he had done.”

— John Connolly

47. “It has always seemed to me that there are two types of people in this world: those rendered impotent by the sheer weight of evil it contains, and who refuse to act because they see no point, and those who choose their battles and fight them to the end, as they understand that to do nothing is definitely worse than to do something and fail. – The Collector.”

— John Connolly

48. “That is what we do for the ones we love: we lie to protect them. Not all truths are welcome.”

— John Connolly

49. “The nature of compassion isn’t coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It’s knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin’ cross for the world to see. You do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

— John Connolly

50. “In general it’s a good idea to avoid people who take themselves too seriously. As individuals, we have only so much seriousness to go round, and people who take themselves very seriously don’t have enough seriousness left over to take other people seriously. Instead they tend to look down on them, and are secretly pleased when they get stuff wrong, because they just prove to the too-serious types that they were right not to take them too seriously to begin with.”

— John Connolly