Elsewhere

by Dean Koontz

Knowledge is a good thing, Jeffrey, but the arrogance that so often comes with knowledge is ultimately our undoing.

she had learned among other things that it was all right to be afraid as long as you didn’t allow your fear to paralyze or in any significant way dispirit you.

Quantum physics, on which most technological advances had been based for decades, predicted the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes side by side, each invisible to the others and yet all subtly affecting one another, somehow sharing a destiny so complex and strange as to defy understanding.

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

As wondrous as life was, it was also full of sadness, and the best way to get past the sad parts and enjoy all the rest was to find the humor in even the darkness. Laughter wasn’t just a medicine for melancholy, but also a sword raised against evil.

If every life was a tree of, say, a billion branches, more being added all the time until you were at last dead in all timelines, then perhaps it was not the way you lived just one life that mattered; instead, perhaps it was the shape and beauty of your spiritual oak, the full pattern of all your lives, on which judgment was passed.

So you'd be judged on a series of lives you knew nothing about and had no control of???

Tragedy was not the end of hope, but the birthing ground of a new hope,

Taking a life in self-defense or to protect the innocent was killing, but it wasn’t murder.

semantics?

He could love other versions of her—How could he not?—but in the thousands of days of their shared lives, he and this Amity laughed at the same things, sorrowed at the same things, weathered precisely the same vicissitudes of life, and no other Amity could be exactly like the one who’d filled his heart for more than a decade.

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