Quotes from The Killing Kind

“I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“You must be careful where you step.
And you must be ready for what you might find.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“The nature of humanity, its essence, is to feel another's pain as one's own, and to act to take that pain away,. There is a nobility in compassion, a beauty in empathy, a grace in forgiveness.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“..her lips were as red as a stop light..”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“He has all the weaknesses that come with a conscience, but none of the strengths.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“Okay," I said hoarsely as the blood left my head and headed south for the winter.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“what human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“wants to accept that someone close might have taken his or her own life. Too much blame accrues to those left behind for it to be accommodated so easily.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“Deborah Mercier couldn’t have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

“Lester Bargus was what people liked to call 'two pounds of shit in a one-pound bag.”
― John Connolly, quote from The Killing Kind

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Popular quotes

“WALTER (Gathering him up in his arms) You know what, Travis? In seven years you going to be seventeen years old. And things is going to be very different with us in seven years, Travis. … One day when you are seventeen I’ll come home—home from my office downtown somewhere— TRAVIS You don’t work in no office, Daddy. WALTER No—but after tonight. After what your daddy gonna do tonight, there’s going to be offices—a whole lot of offices.… TRAVIS What you gonna do tonight, Daddy? WALTER You wouldn’t understand yet, son, but your daddy’s gonna make a transaction … a business transaction that’s going to change our lives. … That’s how come one day when you ’bout seventeen years old I’ll come home and I’ll be pretty tired, you know what I mean, after a day of conferences and secretaries getting things wrong the way they do … ’cause an executive’s life is hell, man—(The more he talks the farther away he gets) And I’ll pull the car up on the driveway … just a plain black Chrysler, I think, with white walls—no—black tires. More elegant. Rich people don’t have to be flashy … though I’ll have to get something a little sportier for Ruth—maybe a Cadillac convertible to do her shopping in. … And I’ll come up the steps to the house and the gardener will be clipping away at the hedges and he’ll say, “Good evening, Mr. Younger.” And I’ll say, “Hello, Jefferson, how are you this evening?” And I’ll go inside and Ruth will come downstairs and meet me at the door and we’ll kiss each other and she’ll take my arm and we’ll go up to your room to see you sitting on the floor with the catalogues of all the great schools in America around you. … All the great schools in the world! And—and I’ll say, all right son—it’s your seventeenth birthday, what is it you’ve decided? … Just tell me where you want to go to school and you’ll go. Just tell me, what it is you want to be—and you’ll be it. … Whatever you want to be—Yessir! (He holds his arms open for TRAVIS) YOU just name it, son … (TRAVIS leaps into them) and I hand you the world!”
― Lorraine Hansberry, quote from A Raisin in the Sun

“Every new experience is unusual. The rest of life is just sleep and committee meetings.”
― John Twelve Hawks, quote from The Traveler

“True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion.”
― Joseph Conrad, quote from The Secret Agent

“Technology tends toward avoidance of risks by investors. Uncertainty is ruled out if possible. People generally prefer the predictable. Few recognize how destructive this can be, how it imposes severe limits on variability and thus makes whole populations fatally vulnerable to the shocking ways our universe can throw the dice.”
― Frank Herbert, quote from Heretics of Dune

“Holly is the fourth-prettiest girl in the class, but the top 3 all have boyfriends. So a lot of guys like me are doing everything they can to get in good with her.”
― Jeff Kinney, quote from The Last Straw

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters 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.