01c. 1945 ADOn those occasions when he had killed in the dark, he later needed to see his victims' faces because, in some unlit corner of his heart, he half expected to find his own face looking up at him, ice-white and dead-eyed. "Deep down," the dream-victim had said, "You know that you're already dead yourself, burnt out inside. You realize that you have far more in common with your victims after you've killed them than before.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
02c. 1945 ADPetting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditation and almost as good for the soul as prayer.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
03c. 1945 ADPeople scare me more than anything, for I know too well the savagery of which humankind is capable.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
05c. 1945 ADIf she fully embraced life with all its conflicts, she would suffer a breakdown.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
06c. 1945 ADFrom all these friends, I could not escape learning some of the statistics that I preferred not to know. Forty-one people at the mall had been wounded. Nineteen had died. Everyone said it was a miracle that only nineteen perished. What has gone wrong with our world when nineteen dead can seem like any kind of miracle?Dean Koontz / quote ↗
07c. 1945 ADTo spare Cloyce's victims further indignities to their memory, I must be a scourge. To prevent others from perhaps being infected by Cloyce's depravity by watching him at work, I must be a scourge. To prevent time management technology from falling into the hands of authorities who, if not already corrupt, would be corrupted by it, I must be a scourge.Scourges aren't heroes.I had never imagined myself to be a hero, but never had I imagined I would be this.Scourges transgress against social and sacred order.A scourge went into darker territory than that. A scourge was not compelled to kill by mental imbalance or emotional confusion or selfish desire. A scourge made a carefully reasoned decision to kill in numbers that exceeded what was absolutely necessary to ensure self-preservation and the defense of the innocent. Even if he killed for the right reason, he was in rebellion against social order and commanding authority.Who scourges will be scourged. In fulfilling this dark role in Roseland, I would bring about my own death.Yet I knew I would not retreat from my decision.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
08c. 1945 ADMy life has a mysterious purpose that I don't understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
09c. 1945 ADIf you really truly want to know, I've thought if I was ever free someday, I might discover I've held my tears so long that I can't cry anymore, that I'm a dry stone and nothing can ever be wrung from me.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
10c. 1945 ADDon't you love your mother, dear?""I guess so. A hard, sharp, thorny kind of love that might be pity more than anything else.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
11c. 1945 ADIt's funny, ma'am, how sometimes you're so sarcastic but it doesn't sting.""Because of my dimples. Dimples are a get-out-of-jail-free cardDean Koontz / quote ↗
14c. 1945 ADHe would never need a knife to spread a pat of butter on his toast. That smile would quickly melt it.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
15c. 1945 ADThat was the splendid thing about life: Though it was cruel, it was also mysterious, filled with wonder and surprise; sometimes the surprises were so amazing that they qualified as miraculous, and by witnessing those miracles, a despondent person could discover a reason to live, a cynic could obtain unexpected relief from ennui, and a profoundly wounded boy could find the will to heal himself and medicine for melancholy.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
16c. 1945 ADAll these girls swooning over hunky vampires, what they really want is to give away their freedom, to be controlled and told what to do and not have to think -- and never die, of course. It's sick is what it is. I don't want to be a forever-young living corpse.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
17c. 1945 ADFree will," she agreed, "our greatest gift, the thing that makes life worth living, in spite of all the anguish it brings.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
18c. 1945 ADShe 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.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
19c. 1945 ADI'm no more a wonder than anyone. And that's what makes the world magical. Every baby's a seed of wonder - that gets watered or it doesn't.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
20c. 1945 ADThis 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.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
21c. 1945 ADFire, 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.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
22c. 1945 ADPeople 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.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
23c. 1945 ADHer 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.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
24c. 1945 ADHer direct stare probed, as if the story of my life were written in my eyes in a few succinct lines that she could read.Dean Koontz / quote ↗
