Quotes by Dean Koontz

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she would interpret any kindness as weakness. Among predatory beasts, any display of weakness is an invitation to attack.

Im no more a wonder than anyone. And thats what makes the world magical. Every babys a seed of wonder - that gets watered or it doesnt.

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, to make us consider that we should trust our intuition as they trust theirs and to help us realize that a thing known intuitively can be as real as anything known by material experience.

Fire, ice, asteroids and pole shifts are bogeymen with which we distract ourselves from the real threat of our time. In an age when everyone invents his own truth, there is no community, only factions. Without community, there can be no consensus to resist the greedy, the envious, the power-mad narcissists who seize control and turn the institutions of civilization into a series of doom machines.

People existed, however, who believed that closet racist were everywhere around them. They needed to believe this in order to have prupose and meaning in their lives, and to have someone to hate.

Her eyes were celadon saucers but bottomless, of such great depth that she could take in the knowledge of whole worlds and have room in that gaze for still more.

Her direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.

You do what you have to do. Thats who you seem to be to me, anyway. Youre one who does what he has to do.

Even the wisest and the best of us can be foolish occasionally.

None of us can ever save himself; we are the instruments of one another’s salvation, and only by the hope that we give to others do we lift ourselves out of the darkness into light.

Besides, I cant get to where I want to go by conscious or unconscious suicide. Ive got my strange little life to lead. Leading it the best I can - thats how I buy the ticket to where I want to be.

Im alive but I have no life. Im alive but also dead. Im dead and alive.

Jocko likes salty, Jocko likes sweet, but never bring Jocko any hot sauce, like with jalapenos, because it makes Jocko squirt funny-smelling stuff out his ears.

...up to no good—and pleased about it.

Once you have had a wonderful dog, a life without one, is a life diminished.

Golden retrievers are not bred to be guard dogs, and considering the size of their hearts and their irrepressible joy in life, they are less likely to bite than to bark, less likely to bark than to lick a hand in greeting. In spite of their size, they think they are lap dogs, and in spite of being dogs, they think they are also human, and nearly every human they meet is judged to have the potential to be a boon companion who might, at many moment, cry, Lets go! and lead them on a great adventure.

Dogs, lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, youre going to lose a dog, and theres going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you cant support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. Theres such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions.

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us. The disappointments of life, the injustices, the battering events that are beyond our control, and the betrayals we endure, from those we befriended and loved, can make us cynical and turn our hearts into flint – on which only the matches of anger and bitterness can be struck into flame. By their delight in being with us, the reliable sunniness of their disposition, the joy they bring to playtime, the curiosity with which they embrace each new experience, dogs can melt cynicism,and sweeten the bitter heart.

After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatures of field and forest had recently visited. The yard was Merlins newspaper.

Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance.