01c. 1945 ADEvery day we make our way through a moral forest, along pathways ever branching. Often we get lost.When the array of paths before us is so perplexing that we can't make a choice, or won't, we can hope that we will be given a sign to guide us. A reliance on sighs, however, can lead to the evasion of all moral obligations, and thus earn a terrible judgment.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
03c. 1945 ADThe line between moral behavior and narcissistic self-righteousness is thin and difficult to discern. The man who stands before a crowd and proclaims his intention to save the seas is convinced that he is superior to a man who merely picks up his own and other people’s litter on the beach, when in fact the latter is in some small way sure to make the world a better place, while the former is likely to be a monster of vanity whose crusade will lead to unintended destruction.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
04c. 1945 ADI can explain why I have to do what I'm about to do, but I'm acutely aware that an explanation is not a righteous justification. What's bad is bad even if necessary.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
05c. 1945 ADBut with the morning almost gone, with seven bodachs in the recreation room, with living boneyards stalking the storm, with Death opening the door to a luge chute and inviting me to go for a bobsled ride, I didn't have time to put on a victim suit and tell the woeful tale of my sorrowful childhood. Neither time nor the inclinationDean Koontz / quote ↗
06c. 1945 ADI'd had much practice turning my mind away from certain memories of my childhood. I could quickly dial her remembered voice from a whisper to a silence.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
07c. 1945 ADHe considered razing the house and rebuilding, but he realized that houses are not haunted, and regardless of the architecture with which we surround ourselves,our ghosts stay with us until we ourselves are ghosts.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
08c. 1945 ADIt was one of those rare times when remembering the dead was more inmportant than tending to the needs of the living.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
09c. 1945 ADYou're a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
10c. 1945 ADThat I had come full circle shouldn't have surprised me, for we are born into time only to be born out of it, after living through the cycles of the seasons, under stars that turn because the world turns, born into ignorance and acquiring knowledge that ultimately reveals to us our enduring ignorance: The circle is the essential pattern of our existence.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
11c. 1945 ADI don't know if this deception qualified as a half-step down the slippery slope. I had no sensation of sliding. But of course we never notice the descent until we're rocketing along at high velocity.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
12c. 1945 ADAlthough he never speaks of how or what or why, I know that his childhood was difficult, that his parents broke his heart. Books and excess poundage are his insulation against pain.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
13c. 1945 ADSome people like to hear themselves talk, but I like to hear myself silent.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
14c. 1945 AD...in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
15c. 1945 ADInitially the snow had been beautiful, but not so much now. The softness and sparkle still charmed, but the storm occluded the sky, denying us the stars. At the moment, I needed to see a firmament of stars, needed to gaze past the moon and through the constellations, needed to see what can't be seen--infinity.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
16c. 1945 ADThen the clarifying thing happens, and what you need to do, what you must do, is not a question, not demand more revelation than what is given, be quiet in the face of it, quiet and grateful that it has been given to you to see this, to be for even a short time aware of the extraordinary layered depths and profound beauty of the world to which we mostly blind ourselves.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
17c. 1945 ADBut the universe in its immensity is nevertheless of a piece, and what applies at one end of it applies at the other. No doubt misery, like happiness and hope, is found throughout the stars.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
18c. 1945 ADQuantum theory tells us, Mr. Thomas, that every point in the universe is intimately connected to every other point, regardless of apparent distance. In some mysterious way, any point on a planet in a distant galaxy is as close to me as you are.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
19c. 1945 ADAs I turned to leave the tent, she said, "Don't worry. Your own mother wouldn't know you."I said, "She never has.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
21c. 1945 ADIf patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony insists that the most harmonious of all patterns, circles within circles, will most often assert itself.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
23c. 1945 ADIt's only life. We all get through it.Not all of us complete the journey in the same condition. Along the way, some lose their legs or eyes in accidents or altercations, while others skate through years with nothing worse to worry about than an occasional bad-hair day.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
24c. 1945 AD..the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
