Top 100 John Connolly Quotes
#1. If 'why' was the first and last question, then 'because I was curious to see what would happen' was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was destined to be the reason for the end of things at the hands of man.
John Connolly
#3. On more than one occasion David, in his urge to explore the darker corners of the bookshelves, had found himself wearing strands of spider silk in his face and hair, causing the web's creator to scuttle into a corner and crouch balefully, lost in thoughts of arachnoid revenge.
John Connolly
#4. Regrets, Blacksmith, make poor currency. You can't but back with them what you most desire.
John Connolly
#5. It's a natural consequence of the capacity of a bookstore or library to contain entire worlds, whole universes, and all contained between the covers of books. In that sense, every library or bookstore is practically infinite.
John Connolly
#6. Every individual spends a lifetime trying to disprove Copernicus by placing him- or herself at the heart of existence, but a small core of diehards manages to turn it into an art.
John Connolly
#7. I was a child who loved books, and I am an adult who is the product of books.
John Connolly
#8. Why is there always one bloke in these boy bands who looks like he came to fix the boiler and somehow got bullied into joining the group?
John Connolly
#9. As I get older I tend to rail against the world more and more.
John Connolly
#10. I met Hamlet at a number 48B bus stop," said Mr. Gedeon. "He'd been there for some time, poor chap. At least eight buses had passed him by, and he hadn't taken any of them. It's to be expected, I suppose. It's in his nature.
John Connolly
#12. Prepare for the worst and you won't be disappointed.
John Connolly
#13. In the old house, the past hung in the air like motes of dust waiting to be illuminated by the sharp rays of memory
John Connolly
#14. When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.
John Connolly
#15. I'd been hurt, and in response I had acted violently, destroying a little of myself each time I did so.
John Connolly
#16. We're the world's leading producer of serial killers. It's a sign of sickness, is what it is. We're sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.
John Connolly
#17. David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether or not the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.
John Connolly
#18. Being clever is not just about how much you know, but about knowing that you really don't know very much at all.
John Connolly
#19. We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).
John Connolly
#20. He thought of the old commonplace about how giving up vices didn't make you live longer, but just made it feel as though you were living longer.
John Connolly
#21. although his physician had advised him not to be overly concerned about forgetting facts and names, and he should begin to worry only if he stopped noticing that he couldn't remember them - if, in essence, he forgot that he was forgetting.
John Connolly
#22. The door, when I tried it, was locked, but a locked door is more the promise of security than security itself.
John Connolly
#23. Mum," said Christopher. "It's a demon. I don't think a poker will hurt it."
"It will where I'm going to put it," said Mrs. Mayer.
John Connolly
#24. Meerlust Rubicon from South Africa, a suitably wintry red.
John Connolly
#25. For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.
John Connolly
#26. I could not live without seasons, for in seasons are reflected in the rhythms of our existence: of birth and maturity, or decline and decay, yet always with the promise of renewal for those who remain.
John Connolly
#27. Being scared isn't the problem. It's not running away that's the hard part.
John Connolly
#28. When I started in homicide, the Dead Sea was just sick.
John Connolly
#29. I'm a ghost," said the small figure, then added, a little uncertainly, "Boo?
John Connolly
#30. Most of the bad situations I've encountered began with the best of intentions.
John Connolly
#31. What is good for you creatively is usually bad commercially. You thrive financially by sticking to a series and not fiddling about too much. You do yourself harm by moving away from the series and the genre. By trying things not based in that particular mode of writing, you will just lose readers.
John Connolly
#32. The day passed, a poor, sluggish thing that departed almost gratefully as night took its place.
John Connolly
#33. Parker felt, not for the first time, as though he had wandered into a ghost story.
John Connolly
#34. Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.
John Connolly
#35. Maybe this is common to all those who lose someone whom they have loved deeply. Making contact with another potential partner, another lover, becomes an act of reconstruction, a building not only of a relationship but also of oneself.
John Connolly
#36. War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity.
John Connolly
#38. I think we've established that her son is crazy, and crazy cancels out clever every time.
John Connolly
#39. does." Not enough of it to avoid dating a jackass like Jeff, but solving other people's problems was often easier than taking care of your own. I considered
John Connolly
#40. It takes time to get used to a strange house, especially one as old as this. Even I sometimes find myself looking over my shoulder when I'm alone in it. It's the way of such places, isn't it? They wear their history heavily.
John Connolly
#41. If he has a weakness, it's that he's a moral being. Where possible, he'll do the right thing, the just thing, and if he does wrong he'll bear the guilt of it.
John Connolly
#43. But there were some who went with her willingly, for there are other women who dream of lying with wolves.
John Connolly
#44. He was in his mid-thirties, tall and pale and thin, with long, sandy hair and rimless glasses, dressed in brown polyester pants, cheap brown shoes, and a light tan shirt. He looked like someone had put a wig on a giraffe and run it through the local Target.
John Connolly
#45. I don't think," he said, "that a vicar is supposed to beat a bishop to death, or even back to death."
Mr. Berkeley looked down upon the remains of Bishop Bernard.
"If anyone asks, we'll say he fell over," he said. "Lots of times.
John Connolly
#46. 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
#47. Perhaps it's true that all men love their fathers, no matter how terrible the things they do to their sons: there is a part of us that remains forever in debt to those responsible for our existence.
John Connolly
#48. It is one thing to be brave in front of others, perhaps for fear of being branded a coward and becoming diminished in their eyes, but another entirely to be brave when there is nobody to witness your courage. The latter is an elemental bravery, a strength of spirit and character.
John Connolly
#49. Mortality shadowed him like a falcon mantling its wings over dying prey.
John Connolly
#50. gazing upon him with eyes that were too old for her face.
John Connolly
#51. He had found it hard to equate the priest's God with the one who had left his mother to die slowly and painfully.
John Connolly
#52. Books are not fixed objects: they transmit words and ideas. Their effect on each reader is unique. They put pictures in our minds. They take root. You
John Connolly
#53. Paunch lapping at his belt like a pale tongue, peeping out from beneath the fabric of his golf shirt, hairy and somehow obscene. He was
John Connolly
#54. My grandfather used to say that if God did not allow a man to be reunited with his dogs in the next life He was no God worth worshipping; that if a dog did not have a soul, then nothing had.
John Connolly
#55. THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN ACADEMIC.
John Connolly
#56. For a moment they still lived and I experienced their deaths as a fresh loss with each waking, so that I was unsure whether I was a man waking from a dream of death or a dreamer entering a world of loss, a man dreaming of unhappiness or a man waking to grief.
John Connolly
#57. She had not given me the cross to keep the bad men away, as a child might have been expected to do. No, in her mind the bad men could not be kept away. They were coming, and they would have to be faced.
John Connolly
#58. If you're getting fucked, then you're getting fucked. But if you're getting fucked by someone who's smiling, then you're really getting fucked.
John Connolly
#60. For a lifetime was but a moment in that place, and each man dreams his own heaven.
And in the darkness David closed his eyes, as all that was lost was found again.
John Connolly
#61. But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.
John Connolly
#62. There was a lot to be said for a man's capacity to be comfortable while alone.
John Connolly
#63. They were on the side of the angels, even if the angels weren't entirely sure that this was a good thing.
John Connolly
#64. It was imaginative people who tended to lie. Lying required making stuff up, and only imaginative people were good at that.
John Connolly
#66. The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.
John Connolly
#67. No matter how hard Evil tries, it can never quite match up to the power of Good, because Evil is ultimately self-destructive. Evil may set out to corrupt others, but in the process corrupts itself.
John Connolly
#68. Because a man who is everybody's friend really has no friends at all.
John Connolly
#69. Although it was cold out, he opened the window slightly because the room smelled of sleep. The action dislodged something red and black from the frame,
John Connolly
#70. He has his father's distinctive good looks, like a badly made crash test dummy. He also smells like a funeral parlor, but that may be incidental.
John Connolly
#71. Why did you shoot him?"
"You weren't around," I replied, my teeth gritted in pain. "If you'd been here I'd have shot you instead.
John Connolly
#72. Angel and Louis in particular could have catalyzed a coma victim back to consciousness. He knew where Parker and the others were
John Connolly
#73. A book is a carrier, and the ideas contained within its covers are an infection waiting to be spread. They breed in men. They adapt according to the host. Books alter men, and men, in their turn, alter worlds.
John Connolly
#74. I think Philip could spend an afternoon throwing puppies from the top of the Empire State and only stop when his arm got tired." "It's not the same as killing
John Connolly
#75. Whimsical people were the type who got run over by cars without anybody really noticing or caring that much beyond the damage to the vehicle, which was usually minimal anyway, whimsical folk being kind
John Connolly
#76. Names did have a power, if they were used in the right way.
John Connolly
#77. Grave emotional injury might somehow have triggered a physical response, so that
John Connolly
#78. [I]gnorance was never an obstacle to a good sound bite.
John Connolly
#79. He would envy each and every living thing its freedom, even if it was only the freedom to die.
John Connolly
#80. Where there are books, there will always be haters of books alongside the lovers of them.
John Connolly
#81. A technician who uses the term "glitch" is like a
Doctor who tells you you're suffering from a "thingy," except the doctor won't tell you to go home and try turning yourself on and off again.
John Connolly
#82. Frank tried to look like he was wrestling with his conscience, although he couldn't have found his conscience without a shovel and an exhumation order.
John Connolly
#83. A discarded newspaper skimmed the sidewalk with a sound like the whisperings of a dead lover.
John Connolly
#84. Sometimes we need our pain. We need it to call our own.
John Connolly
#85. What have you taken from me, and from what have you taken me?
John Connolly
#86. The only person who needs to know about failure is yourself.
John Connolly
#87. Regret, he now knew, was a useless emotion, the poor cousin of guilt.
John Connolly
#88. I slipped from present to past, sliding down the snake heads of memory into what was and what would never be again.
John Connolly
#89. But there was a saying in Hebrew, "We survived Pharoah, we'll survive this too." In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they failed, so let's eat!
John Connolly
#90. Be close to another human being at that instant was enough to convince one, however briefly, that something beyond understanding passed from the body with that final sigh, that some essence began its journey from this world to another.
John Connolly
#91. Look at you," he said. "A fractured man, a broken thing. I asked for money to kill you, but none would give it. Now I understand why. There is no value to you. You're nothing, and therefore nothing is what your life is worth. But I will kill you anyway, out of pity. I
John Connolly
#92. His features were smudged and indistinct, as though a thumb had smeared itself across an ink drawing of a face. His
John Connolly
#93. Drowning men will drag you down if you let them. Sometimes, to survive, you have to let them sink.
John Connolly
#94. First the girl, then the detective, now the wolf. The town was starting to unravel.
John Connolly
#95. trail during the last year, he has not managed the same trick with law enforcement. SPY has learned that Trump's 1988 sale of Resorts International to Merv Griffin is now the subject of two criminal investigations, one by the FBI. "We are looking
John Connolly
#96. Warraner would rather have been the king of nothing than the prince of something.
John Connolly
#97. My God was like a parent always trying to watch out for His children, but you couldn't always be there for your children, no matter how hard you tried. I had not been there for Jennifer when she most needed
John Connolly
#98. No book is really a fixed object. Every reader reads a book differently, and each book works in a different way on each reader.
John Connolly
#99. So, how we doin'?"
"Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people."
"Who we lost?"
"The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton."
"Shit, don't sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will.
John Connolly
#100. The evolutionary curve obviously sloped pretty gently where Six came from.
John Connolly
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