Top 160 John Connolly Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

105. “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

106. “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

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

— John Connolly

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

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

— John Connolly

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

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

— John Connolly

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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

— John Connolly

137. “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

138. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

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

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

— John Connolly

146. “Law and justice are not the same.”

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

150. “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