Elsewhere

by Dean Koontz

Libraries are not safe places, for their shelves are filled with books, but also with ideas regarding freedom, justice, truth, faith, and much more, ideas that some find intolerable.

Doing the right thing is the easiest thing.”

“I’ve been dying since I was born, just like you. And now I’m nearly out of time.”

It’s the incessant need to know more and more and yet still more, to know everything, that is the fast track to destruction. Knowledge is a good thing, Jeffrey, but the arrogance that so often comes with knowledge is ultimately our undoing. Don’t be undone, Jeffrey. Do not be undone by pride in your knowledge.”

The world turns faster every year. The human race is on a rocket ride, Mr. Coltrane. A rocket ride. That’s our destiny.”

The only virtue is vice, and the acquisition of power justifies all things.

Evil people thrived on your fear; they fed on it; they could defeat you only if you made yourself a banquet of fear and were consumed by your enemies.

She didn’t give voice to her thoughts because some second-rate fantasy novels featured pitiful girls who too easily lost their cool. When they became hysterical, they were saved by princes or by families of sympathetic dwarves or by magical wolves. They never got to do any of the really fun stuff themselves; they enjoyed no role except to be rescued.

‘the heart is deceitful above all things.’”

I don’t want to be changed more than I’ve already been. I don’t want the multiverse. All I want is a home, books, and the peace to read them.”

the concept of infinite parallel worlds said something both reassuring and profoundly disturbing about destiny. If every fate to which you could be subjected—those that befell you through no fault of your own and those that you could earn by your actions—unfurled across a multitude of timelines, then your life was like an immense tree of uncountable branches, some leafed and flourishing, others deformed and hung with sick or even poisonous foliage. In the sum of all your lives, you would have known uncountable joys—but also uncountable losses, periods of pain, and fear.

For every life in which you made a ruinous or wicked decision, there was another parallel life where you had the chance to do the right thing.

Everyone deceived everyone else, women and men and children, but in Falkirk’s experience, women were the better at it, especially beautiful women.

Evil never dies. It just closes one franchise and opens another elsewhere.

for every tragedy, there was a triumph, a world where you lived instead of dying, where you found love instead of losing it, where you prospered. Both fate and free will were involved.