Top 160 John Connolly Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Newspaper stories were like newly caught fish, worthy of attention only for as long as they remained fresh, which was not very long at all. They.”

— John Connolly

102. “The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours.”

— John Connolly

103. “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

104. “Sometimes, I think that I concerned myself so much with the possibility of their loss that I never truly took pleasure in the fact of their existence.”

— John Connolly

105. “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

106. “We lose ourselves by degrees: our youth, our souls.”

— John Connolly

107. “We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.”

— John Connolly

108. “Slow animals always become prey in the end.”

— John Connolly

109. “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

110. “Nazism was, at heart, a criminal enterprise, a product of which was the Holocaust. The Nazis were gangsters and thugs. As much as they were ideologically driven, they were also greedy. Pure ideologues don’t pull gold teeth from the mouths of the dead.”

— John Connolly

111. “The law wasn’t a great business to be in if one valued truth, or even justice.”

— John Connolly

112. “Why is there always one bloke in these boy bands who looks like he came to fix the boiler and somehow got bullied into joining the group?”

— John Connolly

113. “Sometimes he would forget her, but in forgetting he would remember her again, and the ache for her would return with a vengeance.”

— John Connolly

114. “Most of the bad situations I’ve encountered began with the best of intentions.”

— John Connolly

115. “He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target.”

— John Connolly

116. “Samuel understood at last why this being hated men and women so much: he hated them because they were so like himself, because the worst of the was mirrored in them. He was the source of all that was bad in men and women, but he had none of the greatness, and none of the grace, of which human beings were capable, so that by only by corrupting them was his own pain diminished, and thus his existence made more tolerable.”

— John Connolly

117. “I’m a ghost,” said the small figure, then added, a little uncertainly, “Boo?”

— John Connolly

118. “They listened to the Beatles for most of the journey, and Hynes explained to Gackowska why Abbey Road was the band’s best record, and how Sgt. Pepper’s wasn’t really a concept album, no matter what anyone claimed to the contrary. Then he had to explain to Gackowska what a concept album was, and a B side, until pretty soon he felt about a hundred years old and was tempted to check himself into a nursing home.”

— John Connolly

119. “Suddenly, it seemed as if David was surrounded by short, unhappy men muttering about “rights” and “liberties” and having enough of “this sort of thing.”

— John Connolly

120. “Astronomers who were recently sifting through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a big dust cloud at the center of our galaxy, found a substance there called ethyl formate, which is the chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, and the smell of rum, the drink popular with pirates. Therefore, our galaxy tastes a bit of raspberries and smells of rum, which is nice.”

— John Connolly

121. “He had found it hard to equate the priest’s God with the one who had left his mother to die slowly and painfully.”

— John Connolly

122. “He had never really speculated about this before, since demons came in all shapes and sizes. Indeed, some of them came in more than one shape or size all by themselves, such as O’Dear, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They’re Overweight, and his twin, O’Really, the Demon of People Who Look in Mirrors and Think They’re Slim When They’re Not.”

— John Connolly

123. “He has his father’s distinctive good looks, like a badly made crash test dummy. He also smells like a funeral parlor, but that may be incidental.”

— John Connolly

124. “Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.”

— John Connolly

125. “He was just thinking aloud, ruling out possibilities by releasing them into the air, like canaries in the coal mine of his mind.”

— John Connolly

126. “He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn’t make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.”

— John Connolly

127. “I was a child who loved books, and I am an adult who is the product of books.”

— John Connolly

128. “Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling.”

— John Connolly

129. “But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelt of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.”

— John Connolly

130. “Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.”

— John Connolly

131. “Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.”

— John Connolly

132. “If he has a weakness, it’s that he’s a moral being. Where possible, he’ll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong he’ll bear the guilt of it.”

— John Connolly

133. “Not every wound needs to be poked and opened, and not every wrong needs to be reexamined, or dragged kicking and screaming into the light. Better just to let the wound heal, even if it doesn’t heal quite right, or to leave the wrongs in the dark, and remind yourself not to go stepping into the shadows if you can avoid it.”

— John Connolly

134. “The beam caught the bowed head of Angel. He glanced up into Bobby Sciorra’s eyes and smiled. Sciorra looked puzzled for a moment and then his mouth opened in slow-dawning realization. He was already turning to try to locate Louis when the darkness seemed to come alive around him and his eyes widened as he realized, too late, that death had come for him too.”

— John Connolly

135. “Badness lingered, and if blood penetrated deep enough into wood, the stain became near permanent. The past gave substance to the present, and all old places were storehouses of memory: the more ancient the site, the greater the accumulation, and bygone atrocities called to new.”

— John Connolly

136. “Stories wanted to be read, David’s mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”

— John Connolly

137. “Perhaps, he considered, her hypocrisy had become so ingrained that she was no longer even capable of perceiving it as such.”

— John Connolly

138. “Names did have a power, if they were used in the right way.”

— John Connolly

139. “If ‘why’ was the first and last question, then because I was curious to see what would happen was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was destined to be the reason for the end of things at the hands of man.”

— John Connolly

140. “You pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions.”

— John Connolly

141. “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

142. “He had counted so carefully. He had abided by the rules, but life had cheated.”

— John Connolly

143. “A job, in their view, was a job, and, as with most jobs, you just had to find that perfect balance between doing as little as possible so you didn’t get tired, and just enough so that you didn’t get fired.”

— John Connolly

144. “She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.”

— John Connolly

145. “A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.”

— John Connolly

146. “These were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside.”

— John Connolly

147. “There’s always someplace to go, even if it’s only someplace else.”

— John Connolly

148. “After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.”

— John Connolly

149. “Stupidity, he knew, did not recognize boundaries of color or creed. But he had come to believe that, like driving a car, people should have to pass a test before being allowed access to the Internet.”

— John Connolly

150. “But I feared more the death of others. I did not want to lose them, I worried about them while they were alive. Sometimes I think I concerned myself so much with the possibility of their loss that I never truly took pleasure in the fact of their existence.”

— John Connolly