Elsewhere

by Dean Koontz

Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia.

He was born wise to the truth of the world: The only virtue is vice, and the acquisition of power justifies all things.

A freak hunt had about as much appeal as handling a live cobra while playing Russian roulette with a revolver.

If a man can’t understand a monster’s suffering, then he’s something of a monster himself.

It would be living on wishes, and if we feed ourselves with nothing but wishes, we starve.

cursing both the God he didn’t believe in and the Devil he knew to be real.

“Sweet. A nice little family. Hostages to fortune. Very brave of you to have a family. A man alone has much less to lose.”

“Think of me as a troll, Nolan. A troll who lives far down in the deepest of deep caverns. Trolls take whatever they want from your world, whatever treasures, whatever pretties, and no one ever follows them down into their caverns to retrieve what they’ve taken, because no one believes trolls exist.”

If progress had once been the friend of average men and women, these days every advance in technology seemed to give an advantage to those who understood that the masses must be managed, controlled, and encouraged to live in a crafted virtual reality where they would be content and confident of their freedom, even though they had none.

“How,” Jeffy wondered, “does a renowned physicist and bow-tied academic turn himself into a kick-ass gunman?” “Necessity.”