Top 160 John Connolly Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

55. “For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven.”

— John Connolly

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

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

— John Connolly

62. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

65. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— John Connolly

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

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

— John Connolly

76. “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

77. “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

78. “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

79. “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

80. “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

81. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

84. “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

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

— John Connolly

86. “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

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “She was night without the promise of dawn, darkness without light.”

— John Connolly

93. “I learned something that day: there may be worse things than arriving somewhere with your dog and leaving without him, but there aren’t many.”

— John Connolly

94. “It didn’t help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldn’t see her. An unseen mother couldn’t go for long walks with you on summer evenings, drawing the names of trees and flowers from her seemingly infinite knowledge of nature; or help you with your homework, the familiar scent of her in your nostrils as she leaned in to correct a misspelling or puzzle over the meaning of an unfamiliar poem; or read with you on cold Sunday afternoons when the fire.”

— John Connolly

95. “It bore an expression he’d seen before: love poisoned by disappointment.”

— John Connolly

96. “I knew that his God – for each man has his own God – let him wander there sometimes, perhaps with the ghost of one of the many dogs that had kept him company through his life yapping at his heels, flushing the birds from the rushes and chasing them for the joy of it. My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a man to be reunited with his dogs in the next life He was no God worth worshipping; that if a dog did not have a soul, then nothing had.”

— John Connolly

97. “His grandfather used to say that there were angels whom devils would greet on the street. If that were true, thought Parker, then let the devils raise their hats to him. It would just make them easier to identify and destroy.”

— John Connolly

98. “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

99. “When Louis relaxed, it was an indication that a threat was at hand and he was preparing to act, as when an archer releases a breath simultaneously with the flight of an arrow, channeling all of the tension into the flighted missile itself.”

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly