“There are no explanations for human evil. Only excuses.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Hunches [are] just messages from the subconscious, which [is] thinking furiously all the time and processing information we have not consciously noted.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“But victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring. Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Human cruelty and treachery surpassed all understanding. There were no answers. Only excuses.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Even if God exists, does He know that you do?”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Much of her life had been lived like a balancing act on a spearpoint fence, and on a particularly difficult night when she was twelve, she had decided that instinct was, in fact, the quiet voice of God. Prayers did receive replies, but you had to listen closely and believe in the answer. At twelve, she wrote in her diary: "God doesn't shout; He whispers, and in the whisper is the way.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Not all or even most suffering is at the hands of fate; it befalls us at our invitation.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“She'd been acutely aware that terror, betrayal, and cruelty had a human face, but she had not sufficiently appreciated that courage, kindness, and love had a human face as well.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Sometimes, just trying was a triumph.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“God does not shout; He whispers, and in that whisper is the way." Chyna Shepard in "Intensity”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Power is living while others inevitably perish. Power is cool indifference to their suffering. Power is taking nourishment from the deaths of others, just as the mighty redwoods draw sustenance from the perpetual decomposition of what once lived, but lived only briefly, around them. This is also part of the philosophy of Edgler Foreman Vess.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“The sole purpose of existence is to open oneself to sensation and to satisfy all appetites as they arise.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“she’d known that being a victim was often a choice people made.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive and able to pee.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“She was reduced to the dependency of an infant, too terrified of life itself to find solace anywhere but in the familiar succoring breast and in the sound of that same heartbeat remembered from the womb.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Now he must deal with the security system, which has recorded everything that he's done. A video camera is mounted over the front door and focused on the cashiers' counter. Edgler Foreman Vess has no desire to see himself on television news. Living with intensity is virtually impossible when one is in prison.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“She wasn’t clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“The normality of the house terrified her: the gleaming surfaces, the tidiness, the homey touches, the sense that a person lived here who might walk in daylight on any street and pass for human in spite of the atrocities that he had committed.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Hope wasn't a cottage industry; it was neither a product that she could manufacture like needlepoint samplers nor a substance she could secrete, in her cautious solitude, like a maple tree producing the essence of syrup. Hope was to be found in other people, by reaching out, by taking risks, by opening her fortress heart.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“It is the purpose for which we exist. This reckless caring.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“victimhood was seductive, a release from responsibility and caring: Fear would be transmuted into weary resignation; failure would no longer generate guilt but, instead, would spawn a comforting self-pity.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“She’d been living in a prison since the day she’d been born, even after leaving her mother, a prison of fear and shame and lowered expectations, and she’d been so accustomed to her circumscribed life that she had not recognized the bars.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“The value of any experience isn’t in its positive or negative effect on his life but in the sheer luminous power of it, the vividness, the ferocity, the amount and degree of pure sensation that it provides. Intensity.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“If coincidence can give, it can take.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“She wasn’t clay in the hands of others; she was rock, and with her own determined hands, she could sculpt the person that she wanted to be. She”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Echoing off the tile walls, the sizzle-splash of the falling water sounded like the hissing of serpents and the brittle laughter of strange children.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“A truly nice smile combined with self-control can take a person a long way.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“On the first of July, while Ariel sat on their blanket, gazing out at the sun-spangled water, Chyna tried to read a newspaper, but every story distressed her. War, rape, murder, robbery, politicians spewing hatred from all ends of the political spectrum. She read a movie review full of vicious ipse dixit criticism of the director and screenwriter, questioning their very right to create, and then turned to a woman columnist’s equally vitriolic attack on a novelist, none of it genuine criticism, merely venom, and she threw the paper in a trash can.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
“Asshole.” “Your mother never taught you words like that.” “You don’t know my mother,” she said thickly.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from Intensity
Dean Koontz
Born place: in Everett, Pennsylvania, The United States
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“But the voices of fear and discontent are always the loudest...”
― Amy Harmon, quote from The Bird and the Sword
“There’s been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. I don’t think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we’ve stayed behind.
I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can’t guide us. Evolution can’t guide us. The C-Z charter says ”understand and respect the universe”… but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ”conquer” Earth, to steal their ”precious” physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ”competition”… as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. ”Conquering the galaxy” is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.
Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That’s why we need to find another space-faring civilisation. Understanding Lacerta is important, the astrophysics of survival is important, but we also need to speak to others who’ve faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”
― Greg Egan, quote from Diaspora
“Sorry,” I muttered. “Just because you’re an asshole doesn’t mean I have to be a bitch.”
― Jenna Black, quote from Glimmerglass
“Brenna jumped to her feet the second Father Sinclair entered the chamber. "I'm so happy to see you," she cried out.
"Be happy sitting down," Jamie ordered, hovering over her patient like a mother hen.”
― Julie Garwood, quote from The Wedding
“You are loved and cherished. You have nothing to fear. There is nothing you can do wrong. If I had to boil this entire message down to one sentence, it would run this way: You are loved. And if I had to boil it down further, to just one word, it would (of course) be, simply: Love.”
― Eben Alexander, quote from Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife
The Children Act
A Whole New World
The Vanishing Throne
The Selected Poetry...
On Stranger TidesBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
