Cold Fire

A high degree of intelligence yes in no other creature in the natural world. That's why nature shuns us and why we subconsciously hate her and seek to obliterate her. High intelligence leads to the concept of progress. Progress leads to nuclear weapons, bio-engineering chaos and ultimately to annihilation.

Snuggle down in my cocoon, be a butterfly soon.

Through Arthur Willott’s dream of alien contact and adventure, you found a doorway out of your despair, an escape from a crushing sense of having failed your mother and father.

There still isn’t a better explanation, I guess, but another possibility has occurred to me, and it’s something so strange and wonderful in its way that I don’t mind losing God from the team.

God grant me the courage to change those things I can’t accept, to accept those things I can’t change, and the wisdom to know the difference. Cliché

It was unnerving to have allies who struck you as goofy; it made your own opinions seem suspect.

noisy group of New Yorkers went past, complaining about the perceived phoniness of California’s have-a-nice-day service ethic, apparently homesick for hostility

He couldn’t rule anything out, not in a world where the trendiest professors of philosophy taught that ethics were always situational and that everyone’s point of view was equally right and valuable,

kids knew that life was scary, yeah, dark and strange, but they also knew that it was silly, that it was meant to be fun, that it was an adventurous journey down a long road of time to an unknown destination in a far and wondrous place.

On Books: " Around her, thousands of times and places, people and worlds, from Mars to Egypt to Yoknapatawpha County, were closed up in the bindings of books like the shine trapped under the tarnished veneer of a brass lamp. She could almost feel them waiting to dazzle with the first turn of a page, come alive with brilliant colors and pungent odors and delicious aromas, with laughter and sobbing and cries and whispers. Books were packaged dreams.

On Evil: "There's too much darkness in some people, corruption that could never be cleaned out in five lifetimes of rehabilitation. Evil is real, it walks the earth. Sometimes the devil works by persuasion. Sometimes he just sets loose these sociopaths who don't have a gene for empathy or one for compassion.

On Religion: "I'm reluctant to believe that some statue of the Holy Mother wept real tears in a church in Cincinnati or Peoria or Teaneck last week after the Wednesday-night bingo games, witnesses only by two teenagers and the parish cleaning lady. And I'm not ready to believe that a shadow resembling Jesus, cast on someone's garage wall by a yellow bug light, is a sign of impending apocalypse. God works in mysterious ways, but not with bug lights and garage walls." Dean Koontz Cold Fire