Top 180 John Connolly Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.”

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

153. “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

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

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

156. “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

157. “Are you sizeist?”

— John Connolly

158. “But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.”

— John Connolly

159. “There was a lot to be said for a man’s capacity to be comfortable while alone.”

— John Connolly

160. “As for dying, he didn’t believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.”

— John Connolly

161. “They were called “rooms,” but it was still a cell. A room you could leave when you chose to do so; a cell you could not.”

— John Connolly

162. “A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover.”

— John Connolly

163. “I looked at him, at his unshaven profile, the wisps of dark hair curling out from under his dark wool hat, the empty coffee cup forgotten in his hand. He was a mass of contradictions. It struck me that I was taking life lessons from a five-six semiretired burglar whose boyfriend, not twentyfour hours earlier, had executed a man against a brick wall. My life, I reflected, was taking some strange turns.”

— John Connolly

164. “Cresil leaned forward, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints of hate.”

— John Connolly

165. “Mrs. Abernathy frightened him, the way strong women will often frighten weak men.”

— John Connolly

166. “It’s good that you have someone that cares for you. It doesn’t make it easier, but it sure doesn’t make it harder.”

— John Connolly

167. “Some words can only be spoken to those for whom we feel passionately and deeply, just as some silences can only be shared by lovers.”

— John Connolly

168. “A faint mist hung over the streets, creating penumbrae around the streetlights like the halos of saints, and making a dreamscape of the skyline.”

— John Connolly

169. “Families,” said Angel, with some feeling. “Can’t live with them, can’t have them killed without complications.”

— John Connolly

170. “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. Harpur Griffin was just such a man, spurred on by a suspicion, although he could never have expressed it in so many words, that he was just an emptiness with a name.”

— John Connolly

171. “That was what death was like: trapped in a small space with a big weight holding you down for all eternity.”

— John Connolly

172. “Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.”

— John Connolly

173. “They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied.”

— John Connolly

174. “There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair’s breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.”

— John Connolly

175. “From high in the air, London would look just like a model, with toy houses and miniature trees on tiny streets. Maybe that was the only way you could drop the bombs: by pretending that it wasn’t real, that nobody would burn and die when they exploded below.”

— John Connolly

176. “That was what stories did, or the ones that mattered to us: They helped us to understand others, but they could also make us feel understood in turn, and less alone in the world.”

— John Connolly

177. “They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves.”

— John Connolly

178. “It’s not the people who read books you have to worry about, but the people who don’t.”

— John Connolly

179. “Sometimes, in life as in dreams, the world tries to communicate a truth to us, but in a manner so subtle that it takes us time to figure out.”

— John Connolly

180. “Anyway, so he bounces in on his white horse like a big perfumed tea cozy, getting involved in affairs that are none of his business, and next thing you know she wakes up and – ooooh! – was she in a bad mood.”

— John Connolly

181. “There appeared to be only two types of business in the town: everybody’s business, and business that was not yet everybody’s but soon would be once the local gossips had got to work on it.”

— John Connolly