Dean Koontz quote: "Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated."

Some days I'm lucky to squeeze out a page of copy that pleases me, but I get as many as six or s...
DEAN KOONTZ

If I drive myself to the brink of my ability, then I don't get stale or bored.
DEAN KOONTZ

Petting, scratching, and cuddling a dog could be as soothing to the mind and heart as deep meditatio...
DEAN KOONTZ

I'm small, I'm young - and I'm so different. You've always respected that difference, and you've alw...
DEAN KOONTZ

Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because...
DEAN KOONTZ

the worst happens when you least expect it
DEAN KOONTZ

No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disag...
DEAN KOONTZ

Even as a child, she had preferred night to day, had enjoyed sitting out in the yard after sunset, u...
DEAN KOONTZ

If one's friends do not openly laugh at him, they are not in fact his friends.
DEAN KOONTZ

Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Every eye sees its own special vision,
every ear hears a most different song.
In each man's ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Creating a family in this turbulent world is an act of faith, a wager that against all odds there wi...
DEAN KOONTZ

Each small act of kindness reverberates across great distances and spans of time, affecting lives un...
DEAN KOONTZ

Like all of us in this storm between birth and death, I can wreak no great changes on the world, onl...
DEAN KOONTZ

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowi...
DEAN KOONTZ

I really believe that everyone has a talent, ability, or skill that he can mine to support himself a...
DEAN KOONTZ

Given enough time, you could convince yourself that loneliness was something better, that it was sol...
DEAN KOONTZ

Every book has some real life in it. I was never pursued by an evil twin clone, but everything else ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Dear, the man can't be eviscerated because he has no viscera. He's a walking colon. If you cut him o...
DEAN KOONTZ

He once told me that an August evening was "as hot as three toads in a Cuisinart," a comparison that...
DEAN KOONTZ

At fifty-one, why would she choose to dispose of her house, uproot herself, and come here to be a pa...
DEAN KOONTZ

...it will be a world made not bright but brighter, not clean but cleaner.
DEAN KOONTZ

I'm alive but I have no life. I'm alive but also dead. I'm dead and alive.
DEAN KOONTZ

As we passed his table, I saw that the device that imprisoned the book was clever but wicked-looking...
DEAN KOONTZ

Intuition is seeing with the soul.
DEAN KOONTZ

Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’r...
DEAN KOONTZ

We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Even someone like Mrs. Bonnaventura, who had lived a mostly blameless life, when ushered into the aw...
DEAN KOONTZ

tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.
DEAN KOONTZ

Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.
Women were more likely than men to think that their l...
DEAN KOONTZ

When I see those sad, abused and neglected animals on those commercials I feel despair for the human...
DEAN KOONTZ

For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.
The only thing th...
DEAN KOONTZ

The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness was an opportunity for a lost and selfis...
DEAN KOONTZ

Dogs' lives are short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose...
DEAN KOONTZ

The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring he...
DEAN KOONTZ

For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one...
DEAN KOONTZ

Like children, dogs want discipline and are most secure when they have rules to live by. The happies...
DEAN KOONTZ

At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of ev...
DEAN KOONTZ

Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.
DEAN KOONTZ

We're out of cocktail olives, it's a tragedy of historic proportions, but we're coping because we're...
DEAN KOONTZ

The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a ...
DEAN KOONTZ

I can love October in September. September doesn’t care.
DEAN KOONTZ

Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that n...
DEAN KOONTZ

The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness is an opportunity for a lost and selfish...
DEAN KOONTZ

To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but again...
DEAN KOONTZ

Sometimes there is no darker place than our thoughts, the moonless midnight of the mind.
DEAN KOONTZ

How obvious can it be? ... The purpose of makeup is to defy the degradations of time, and time is ju...
DEAN KOONTZ

Grief can destroy you --or focus you. You can decide a relationship was all for nothing if it had to...
DEAN KOONTZ

Bunny slippers remind me of who I am. You can't get a swelled head if you wear bunny slippers. You c...
DEAN KOONTZ

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

A fine line separates the weary recluse from the fearful hermit. Finer still is the line between her...
DEAN KOONTZ

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have.
DEAN KOONTZ

Never leave a friend behind. Friends are all we have to get us through this life--and they are the o...
DEAN KOONTZ

Although charismatic, James Dean is no Harrison Ford. In the majority of his movies, sooner or later...
DEAN KOONTZ

There's more to me than you see, another me down inside somewhere, full of hate, ready to hurt, cut,...
DEAN KOONTZ

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowi...
DEAN KOONTZ

Clegg's stories can chill the spine so effectively that the reader should keep paramedics on standby...
DEAN KOONTZ

Love was a sacred garment, woven of a fabric so thin that it could not be seen, yet so strong that e...
DEAN KOONTZ

I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of pri...
DEAN KOONTZ

Loyal companions are an unequaled grace, stanching fear before it bleeds you numb, a reliable antido...
DEAN KOONTZ

Because people see violence on the movie screen, they're not going to go out and hold up a liquo...
DEAN KOONTZ

Change isn't easy... changing the way you live means changing what you believe about life. That's ha...
DEAN KOONTZ

We are not strangers to ourselves, we only try to be.
DEAN KOONTZ

Literary fiction, as a strict genre, is all but dead. Meanwhile, most genres flourish.
DEAN KOONTZ

Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for...
DEAN KOONTZ

The truth was stranger than the official fiction.
DEAN KOONTZ

Tommy and Scootie locked eyes. Only minutes ago, he wouldn't have believed that he could ever have f...
DEAN KOONTZ

I never knew whether I was drawn to eccentric people or if they were drawn to me.
DEAN KOONTZ

I am the One, and I see all.
But the blind man in Apartment 1-A is blind in many ways, as are a...
DEAN KOONTZ

In self-defense and in defense of the innocent, cowardice is the only sin.
DEAN KOONTZ

People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hur...
DEAN KOONTZ

I'm no more a wonder than anyone. And that's what makes the world magical. Every baby's a seed of wo...
DEAN KOONTZ

Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they ...
DEAN KOONTZ

We are an arrogant species, full of terrible potential, but we also have a great capacity for love, ...
DEAN KOONTZ

We're not here to leave a mark, bro. Monuments, legacies, marks - that's where we always go wrong. W...
DEAN KOONTZ

When tempest tossed, embrace chaos
DEAN KOONTZ

Perhaps they thought they could bring to this valley only those things they loved, leaving behind al...
DEAN KOONTZ

The world howls for social justice, but when it comes to social responsibility, you sometimes can't ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Evil travels the world in anonymity, its presence revealed only by the periodic consequences of its ...
DEAN KOONTZ

If patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives — and they do — then the law of harmony ins...
DEAN KOONTZ

Hope lies in action
DEAN KOONTZ

I’m a bad case of arrested development, stuck in early adolescence, more screwed-up-twisted-up-tan...
DEAN KOONTZ

if you were always guided by courage, honor, self-respect, honesty, and compassion, and if you kept ...
DEAN KOONTZ

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I tend to do that. Any life isn’t just one story; it’s thousa...
DEAN KOONTZ

Action. Action, shaped by intelligence and a moral perspective, is the answer to most problems.
DEAN KOONTZ

Although enlightened people know that an extreme phobia wasn't a form of madness, hey could not help...
DEAN KOONTZ

Terror and pleasure are linked in us. We are a baldly miswired species, Martie. Terror delights us, ...
DEAN KOONTZ

At his passing, there was not even an eddy in the snow, neither the briefest glimpse of the occluded...
DEAN KOONTZ

Regardless of what our Creator intended us to be, what we have become is what we are.
DEAN KOONTZ

Where does fiction end and reality begin?
DEAN KOONTZ

Sometimes he found it frustrating to be a sadist in an age when self-mutilation was all the rage
DEAN KOONTZ

Most people regarded Psychology as a science. Some called it a soft science, but those making such a...
DEAN KOONTZ

She turned more heads than a coven of chiropractors.
DEAN KOONTZ

Life would be easy if common sense ruled; but sometimes the easy way doesn't feel like the right way...
DEAN KOONTZ

My rich Diana. Fly me to the moon with you. Dance among the stars.
Treacle. Romantic hogwash. ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Paper clip. Ping. Disaster. Colonel Bowie is down. Colonel Bowie is down! The Mexican Army is now le...
DEAN KOONTZ

Martie came out of the office first, smiling prettily, and Dusty rose to greet her, smiling less pre...
DEAN KOONTZ

Man, I like you. I wish you could like me.
DEAN KOONTZ

In the wind, the trees, like agitated lions preparing to roar, shook their great green manes.
DEAN KOONTZ

Grapes are juicy. Strawberries. Oranges. Good pork chops are succulent," said Dusty. "But the word i...
DEAN KOONTZ

Life is a train ride, and at the many stations along the route, people important to us debark, never...
DEAN KOONTZ

The retriever took each bit of meat from his master's hand with a delicacy almost equal to that of a...
DEAN KOONTZ

Language can't describe reality. Literature has no stable reference, no real meaning. Each reader's ...
DEAN KOONTZ

The rain wasn't the usual glittering silver, but dark and dirty, as if nature were a scrubwoman wrin...
DEAN KOONTZ

The primitive in each of us climbs closer to the surface during the night, for the moon sings to it,...
DEAN KOONTZ

Funny, how one good cookie could calm the mind and even elevate a troubled soul.
DEAN KOONTZ

After his dinner, the wolfhound liked to prowl the grounds, sniffing the grass to learn what creatur...
DEAN KOONTZ

people have a natural tendency to anthropomorphize their pets, to ascribe human perceptions and inte...
DEAN KOONTZ

Even if there are moments during the day when all seems normal and when every action of your own and...
DEAN KOONTZ

Everything barbarians do is nothing, no matter how loudly they insist it's something.
DEAN KOONTZ

You had a good dinner of properly fried food, and if you want to live long enough to have another on...
DEAN KOONTZ

In this world where too many are willing to see only the light that is visible, never the Light Invi...
DEAN KOONTZ

Nothing supernatural has ever harmed me. My wounds and losses have all be at the hands of human bein...
DEAN KOONTZ

Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.
DEAN KOONTZ

The life of a seamstress is no smaller than the life of a queen, the life of a child with Down syndr...
DEAN KOONTZ

No matter how close we are to another person, few human relationships are as free from strife, disag...
DEAN KOONTZ

Protracted self-promotion drains something essential from the soul,
DEAN KOONTZ

Their perpetual readiness for play is endearing, and their willingness to forgive deception time aft...
DEAN KOONTZ

We took comfort in the knowledge that God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must ...
DEAN KOONTZ

A dog can be a living work of art, a constant reminder of the exquisite design and breathtaking deta...
DEAN KOONTZ

Dogs might love a place, as people do, but the only place they love beyond all others is the place w...
DEAN KOONTZ

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us.
DEAN KOONTZ

This may be the primary purpose of dogs: to restore our sense of wonder and to help us maintain it, ...
DEAN KOONTZ

On the other hand, dogs eat with gusto, play with exuberance, work happily when given the opportunit...
DEAN KOONTZ

We are fictioneers.
DEAN KOONTZ

May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog? ... You have been given stewardship of what you in ...
DEAN KOONTZ

May I tell you a wonderful truth about your dog? ... In our religion, we believe in reincarnation. W...
DEAN KOONTZ

In August of 1998, I completed Seize the Night, the sequel to my novel Fear Nothing, o...
DEAN KOONTZ

Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’r...
DEAN KOONTZ

A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke....
DEAN KOONTZ

Too many of us die without knowing transcendent joy, in part because we pursue one form or another o...
DEAN KOONTZ

Truth is always stranger than fiction. We craft fiction to match our sense of how things ought to be...
DEAN KOONTZ

In each little life, we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way o...
DEAN KOONTZ

One of the greatest gifts we receive from dogs is the tenderness they evoke in us. The disappointmen...
DEAN KOONTZ

When you have dogs, you witness their uncomplaining acceptance of suffering, their bright desire to ...
DEAN KOONTZ

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

Maybe if everything was beautiful, nothing would be.
People saw one thing, they swooned over it...
DEAN KOONTZ

Evil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless too. Friendship is a re...
DEAN KOONTZ

In even a clear heart, some righteous acts of the harder kind can stir up a sediment of guilt, but t...
DEAN KOONTZ

Golden retrievers are not bred to be guard dogs, and considering the size of their hearts and their ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Listen, child—if you’re at a party with a hundred people and one of them is the devil, he’ll b...
DEAN KOONTZ

The only thing I know for sure is how much I do not know.
DEAN KOONTZ

...in an infinite universe, anything that could be imagined might somewhere exist.
DEAN KOONTZ

Being a bad guy was easy, being a hero was hard.
DEAN KOONTZ

On an individual level, the human condition changed day by day, even hour by hour, and while you wer...
DEAN KOONTZ

Do as little harm to others as you can; make any sacrifice for your true friends; be responsible for...
DEAN KOONTZ

Nothing gives us courage more readily than the desire to avoid looking like a damn fool.
DEAN KOONTZ

Human beings can always be relied upon to exert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid.
DEAN KOONTZ

One of the greatest sorrows of human exisence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive bu...
DEAN KOONTZ

When I was eight I remember writing one about the perfect puppy, ... I guess I always liked dogs, to...
DEAN KOONTZ

Perhaps extreme danger strips us of all pretenses, all ambitions, all confusions, focusing us more i...
DEAN KOONTZ

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen an...
DEAN KOONTZ

The hands of every clock are shears, trimming us away scrap by scrap, and every time piece with a di...
DEAN KOONTZ

Some people think only intellect counts: knowing how to solve problems, knowing how to get by, knowi...
DEAN KOONTZ

I can't go on to page two until I can get page one as perfect as I can make it, ... That might mean ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. So...
DEAN KOONTZ

A fanatic is a nut who has something to believe in.
DEAN KOONTZ

The world was a maze of mysteries and puzzles, but it was a world of rational design that did not pr...
DEAN KOONTZ

Damn it, there is no world if there is not a human eye to see it, no world of any purpose or meaning...
DEAN KOONTZ

Hell of a thing to have to experience, hell of a thing to have to see, to be reminded you're a human...
DEAN KOONTZ

In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of...
DEAN KOONTZ

Patterns exist in our seemingly patternless lives, and the most common pattern is the circle.
DEAN KOONTZ

Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Initially the snow had been beautiful, but not so much now. The softness and sparkle still charmed, ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Human beings not only can't bear too much reality, we flee from reality when someone doesn't force u...
DEAN KOONTZ

In this age, lies were the universal lubricant of the culture. A love of Truth and commitment to it ...
DEAN KOONTZ

In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen mom...
DEAN KOONTZ

I have avoided becoming stale by putting a little water on the plate, lying on the plate, and having...
DEAN KOONTZ

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and p...
DEAN KOONTZ

Somebody asked me about the current choice we're being given in the presidential election. I sai...
DEAN KOONTZ

Some big guys, they think struttin' the muscle will put your tail between your legs, but all they go...
DEAN KOONTZ

The world has too few modest fry cooks and far too many self-important professors.
DEAN KOONTZ

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life wo...
DEAN KOONTZ

They said there was no rest for the wicked. In fact, there was rest neither for the virtuous nor the...
DEAN KOONTZ

Lies hurt people; imagination makes life more fun.
DEAN KOONTZ

I thought you married me for my looks, my sensitivity, and my fabulous bedroom stamina."

...
DEAN KOONTZ

Although he was a young and virile man at 37, he was not inexhaustible. In addition to food and drin...
DEAN KOONTZ

It's difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear...
DEAN KOONTZ

You're a poster boy for sincerity. You have all the guile of a lamb.
DEAN KOONTZ

From birth to death we explore and seek, and in the end we arrive where we started, the past having ...
DEAN KOONTZ

That I had come full circle shouldn't have surprised me, for we are born into time only to be born o...
DEAN KOONTZ

She might have been born this way, without an empathy gene and other essentials. In that case, she w...
DEAN KOONTZ

For the likes of you, the path to happiness is one mean son of a bitch of a path.
DEAN KOONTZ

One of the things I like enormously about Bob Weinstein is that that he's the only studio head I...
DEAN KOONTZ

I don't find slashing and blood flying everywhere to be scary. I just find it repulsive.
DEAN KOONTZ

That's life. Something always happens. We don't live in stasis, frozen in amber.
DEAN KOONTZ

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins.
DEAN KOONTZ

The sky is deep, the sky is dark. The light of the stars is o damn stark/When I look up, I fill with...
DEAN KOONTZ

The galleon clouds seemed to have dropped anchor in the sky, and the night appeared to have frozen i...
DEAN KOONTZ

Lem searched for the words to convey what he felt. As he found the language to describe what the dog...
DEAN KOONTZ

it grinned the foolish and charmingly witless grin of all dogs who had ever ridden shotgun in such a...
DEAN KOONTZ

Moral responsibility is on the shoulders of those who take the technology out of the lab and use it ...
DEAN KOONTZ

Although the constant shadow of certain death looms over every day, the pleasures and joys of life c...
DEAN KOONTZ

There’s such a thing as trying too hard, he told himself. It causes constipation of the mind. But ...
DEAN KOONTZ

He continued to stroke its back and scratch its ears, but after a minute or two he realized he was s...
DEAN KOONTZ

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any rea...
DEAN KOONTZ

He was sure that he was not the cause of the abrupt silence. His passage through the canyon had not ...
DEAN KOONTZ

His love was an architect that entirely remade the reality of the chapel, transforming it into a cat...
DEAN KOONTZ

The dog chose more letters, waited for them to study the words, then looked solemnly at each of them...
DEAN KOONTZ

But this animal’s unadulterated joy in being alive was like a spotlight that pierced Travis’s in...
DEAN KOONTZ

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated.

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Dean Koontz

Pain can be endured and defeated only if it is embraced. Denied or feared, it grows in perception if not in reality. The best response to terror is righteous anger, confidence in ultimate justice, a refusal to be intimidated.

Dean Koontz

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