Quotes by John Connolly

After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul.

There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of ones humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.

If it is true that nature abhors a vacuum, then criminality regards it as a business opportunity.

When one encounters enough strangeness, then what is strange ultimately becomes familiar.The mind can accommodate itself to almost anything, given time: pain, grief, loss, even the possibility that the dead talk to the living.

Once upon a time – for that is how all stories should begin – there was a boy who lost his mother.

We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).

The Detective was different. Not that he wasnt a good man; Willie had heard enough about him to understand that he was the kind who didnt like to turn away from anothers pain, the kind who couldnt put a pillow over his ears to drown out the cries of strangers. Those scars he had were badges of courage, and Willie knew that there were others hidden beneath his clothes, and still more deep inside, right beneath the skin and down to the soul. No, it was just that whatever goodness was there coexisted with rage and grief and loss.

As for dying, he didnt 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.

It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.

Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.

Was that his name? I never had a chance to ask. He was too intent upon tearing out my throat for us to engage in idle chitchat.

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.

And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.

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

It didnt help when he told David that his mother would always be with him, even if he couldnt see her. An unseen mother couldnt 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.

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

The nature of compassion isnt coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: Its 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 its the right thing to do.

The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel anothers pain as ones own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.

Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.

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.