Dean Koontz · 354 pages
Rating: (23.4K votes)
“Dogs, lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There's such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware that it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and the mistakes we make because of those illusions.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Too many dogs continue to be abused and abandond - one is too many - and people continue to kill people for money and envy and no reason at all. Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognised, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness is an opportunity for a lost and selfish heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Bad people succeed and good people fail, but that's not the end of the story. Miracles happen that nobody sees, and among us walk heroes who are never recognized, and people live in loneliness because they cannot believe they are loved.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“I can love October in September. September doesn’t care.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“The geometry of judgment is a circle. Hate is a snake that turns to consume itself from the tail, a circle that diminishes to a point, then to nothing. Pride is such a snake, and envy, and greed. Love, however, is a hoop, a wheel, that rolls on forever. We are rescued by those whom we have rescued. The saved become the saviors of their saviors.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“We're out of cocktail olives, it's a tragedy of historic proportions, but we're coping because we're Americans.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Like children, dogs want discipline and are most secure when they have rules to live by. The happiest dogs are those with gentle masters who quietly but firmly demand respect.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one dark place or another, and tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Dogs' lives are short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you're going to lose a dog, and there's going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can't support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“When I see those sad, abused and neglected animals on those commercials I feel despair for the human race. Too many people repay loyalty with faithlessness and give no thought to their own final hours when the might have to ask another to grant them the mercy that they withheld from those who trusted them.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“The opportunity to love a dog and to treat it with kindness was an opportunity for a lost and selfish human heart to be redeemed. They are powerless and innocent, and it is how we treat the humblest among us that surely determines the fate of our souls. Cinnamon”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“For a long time things were so bad. Very bad. Dark even when there was light.
The only thing that kept the dark back was the Forever Shiny Thing that was her secret...
It is a word...the word hangs on a silver chain. The word is HOPE.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Even someone like Mrs. Bonnaventura, who had lived a mostly blameless life, when ushered into the awesome presence of the Creator of the infinite universe and also of the butterfly, would discover ten thousand fearsome new layers of meaning in the word humility.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Billy Pilgrim had a theory about diaries.
Women were more likely than men to think that their lives had sufficient meaning to require recording on a daily basis. It was not for the most part a God-is-leading-me-on-a-wondrous-journey kind of meaning, but more an I've-gotta-be-me-but-nobody-cares sentimentalism that passed for meaning, and they usually stopped keeping a diary by the time they hit thirty, because by then they didn't want to ponder the meaning of life anymore because it scared the crap out of them.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self interest.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Dogs’ lives are short, too short, but you know that going in. You know the pain is coming, you’re going to lose a dog, and there’s going to be great anguish, so you live fully in the moment with her, never fail to share her joy or delight in her innocence, because you can’t support the illusion that a dog can be your lifelong companion. There’s such beauty in the hard honesty of that, in accepting and giving love while always aware it comes with an unbearable price. Maybe loving dogs is a way we do penance for all the other illusions we allow ourselves and for the mistakes we make because of those illusions.” Dear”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
“Golden retrievers are not bred to be guard dogs, and considering the size of their hearts and their irrepressible joy in life, they are less likely to bite than to bark, less likely to bark than to lick a hand in greeting. In spite of their size, they think they are lap dogs, and in spite of being dogs, they think they are also human, and nearly every human they meet is judged to have the potential to be a boon companion who might, at any moment, cry “Let’s go!” and lead them on a great adventure.”
― Dean Koontz, quote from The Darkest Evening of the Year
Dean Koontz
Born place: in Everett, Pennsylvania, The United States
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“she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.”
― Anne Rice, quote from Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire, The Vampire Lestat, The Queen of the Damned (Anne Rice)
“Nobody ever called me any OH MY GOD you mean that guy that one that set himself on FIRE!"
"As I said, fanatics."
"But he set himself on fire!"
"Centuries of useless, obsessive waiting. Makes a human-"
"HE SET HIMSELF ON FIRE!
"Maybe he was cold.”
― Joss Whedon, quote from Fray
“What a happy woman I am living in a garden, with books, babies, birds, and flowers, and plenty of leisure to enjoy them! Yet my town acquaintances look upon it as imprisonment, and I don't know what besides, and would rend the air with their shrieks if condemned to such a life. Sometimes I feel as if I were blest above all my fellows in being able to find my happiness so easily. I believe I should always be good if the sun always shone, and could enjoy myself very well in Siberia on a fine day. And what can life in town offer in the way of pleasure to equal the delight of any one of the calm evenings I have had this month sitting alone at the foot of the verandah steps, with the perfume of young larches all about, and the May moon hanging low over the beeches, and the beautiful silence made only more profound in its peace by the croaking of distant frogs and hooting of owls?”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, quote from Elizabeth and Her German Garden
“I saw a small square of paper, folded over on itself and sealed with a blob of wax from the candle by my bed. Cracking it open, I recognized Kiernan’s hand.
Don’t you dare get up until you’re rested! When you are, send one of those message lights and I’ll come. In the meantime, I’ll talk to O., see if she remembers anything about last night. And I’ll find out if anyone saw M. or N. wandering the palace last night. Don’t frown like that! I’ll be sly.
I was frowning, I realized, which made me let out an irritated huff of breath. He knew me too well.”
― Eilis O'Neal, quote from The False Princess
“Pessimism is not good for the soul."
"I sold my soul years ago."
"To whom?"
"The bitch goddess Success. She cut town before paying off.”
― Jonathan Kellerman, quote from When the Bough Breaks
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