Top 160 John Connolly Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven.”

— John Connolly

52. “My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man’s.”

— John Connolly

53. “The day passed, a poor, sluggish thing that departed almost gratefully as night took its place.”

— John Connolly

54. “I’d been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.”

— John Connolly

55. “He will say less than he means, and conceal more than he reveals.”

— John Connolly

56. “A mobster who knew Trump socially said of him once, “He’d lie to you about what time of day it is – just for the practice.”

— John Connolly

57. “I believe in those whom I love and trust.”

— John Connolly

58. “Instead, there was only the kind of silence that comes when someone takes away a clock to be repaired and after a time you become aware of its absence because its gentle, reassuring tick is gone and you miss it so.”

— John Connolly

59. “Then again, maybe nostalgia was an understandable response to a world that appeared to be going all to hell, as long as everyone remembered that the past was a nice place to visit but nobody should want to settle in it. One.”

— John Connolly

60. “We face those that we have to face, and there will be times when we must make the choice to act for a 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.”

— John Connolly

61. “Being clever is not just about how much you know, but about knowing that you really don’t know very much at all.”

— John Connolly

62. “Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by flashlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world.”

— John Connolly

63. “It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins.”

— John Connolly

64. “Most criminals were dumb, and he took the view that the whole science of criminology was essentially flawed, since much of its theory was based on the study of criminals who had been caught, and were therefore either stupid or unlucky, as opposed to the study of those who had not been caught, and were therefore smart and had a little luck on their side, but just a little. Luck ran out, but smart was for life.”

— John Connolly

65. “I made you do nothing, Jonathan,” replied the Crooked Man. “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

66. “Warraner looked pleasantly surprised at the question, like a Mormon who had suddenly found himself invited into a house for coffee, cake, and a discussion of the wit and wisdom of Joseph Smith.”

— John Connolly

67. “What do you believe in?” asked David. “I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?”

— John Connolly

68. “When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.”

— John Connolly

69. “It didn’t matter whether a thing existed or not. What mattered was the trouble caused by those who believed in its existence.”

— John Connolly

70. “A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer.”

— John Connolly

71. “On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web’s creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge.”

— John Connolly

72. “Misery loved company, but damnation needed it.”

— John Connolly

73. “Perhaps it’s true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence.”

— John Connolly

74. “War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity.”

— John Connolly

75. “Deborah Mercier couldn’t have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She.”

— John Connolly

76. “Okay,” I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.”

— John Connolly

77. “There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others.”

— John Connolly

78. “There’s a kind of evil that isn’t even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It’s a foulness that’s right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It’s in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.” “And while we’re alive?” “We set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too.”

— John Connolly

79. “A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders. –.”

— John Connolly

80. “Sometimes we need our pain. We need it to call our own.”

— John Connolly

81. “The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.”

— John Connolly

82. “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. That’s just the way Evil is. All things considered, it’s better to be on the side of Good, even if Evil occasionally has nicer uniforms.”

— John Connolly

83. “People suffered all the time, and died badly. Many called on God to save them at the end, but if God heard their pleas, He chose not to answer. Maybe the pastor was wrong. Maybe God was imperfect, and men, by acting in their own interests, were reflecting only the reality of His nature.”

— John Connolly

84. “You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.”

— John Connolly

85. “She was plump, with dyed red hair and a face so caked with cosmetics that the floor of the Amazon jungle probably saw more natural light...”

— John Connolly

86. “I have found in the past that what passes for coincidence is usually life’s way of telling you that you’re not paying enough attention.”

— John Connolly

87. “Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one’s view of them.”

— John Connolly

88. “I believe in evil because I have touched it, and it has touched me.”

— John Connolly

89. “The law doesn’t require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that’s acceptable to both sides. You want to know the only truth is? Everybody lies. – Elwin Stark.”

— John Connolly

90. “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

91. “We haunt ourselves, I sometimes think; or, rather, we choose to be haunted. If there is a hole in our lives, then something will fill it. We invite it inside, and it accepts willingly.”

— John Connolly

92. “He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.”

— John Connolly

93. “There were books everywhere: on the floors, on the stairs, on furniture both built for that purpose and constructed for other ends entirely. There were bookshelves in the main hallway, in the downstairs rooms, and in the upstairs rooms. There were even bookshelves in the bathroom and the kitchen.”

— John Connolly

94. “What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.”

— John Connolly

95. “And Nurd, who had never had a mother and father, and who had never loved or been loved, marvelled at the ways in which feeling so wonderful could also leave one open to so much pain. In a strange way, he envied Samuel even that. He wanted to care about someone so much that it could hurt.”

— John Connolly

96. “Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.”

— John Connolly

97. “It is one thing to be brave in front of others, perhaps for fear of being branded a coward and becoming diminished in their eyes, but another entirely to be brave when there is nobody to witness your courage. The latter is an elemental bravery, a strength of spirit and character.”

— John Connolly

98. “David tried to give a form to the beast at the heart of the poem but found that he could not. It was more difficult than it appeared, for nothing quite seemed to fit. Instead, he could only conjure up a half-formed being that crouched in the cobwebbed corners of his imagination where all the things that he feared curled and slithered upon one another in the darkness.”

— John Connolly

99. “The four ages of man, as far as Williamson was concerned, were confusion, anger, complacency, and grumpiness, but it was important to embrace them in the right order. The.”

— John Connolly

100. “He had always worried about her when he was in school, because if he was away from her then he had no control over her existence.”

— John Connolly