Elsewhere

by Dean Koontz

Remaining hopeful is always the right way to be.”

Having lived with this loss so long, they dwelt in neither sorrow nor resentment.

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.

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.

He said, “Shit.”

Her father didn’t often resort to such language. Amity wasn’t yet allowed to use that word; it was reserved for grown-ups, so they could sound more mature than children. But she figured that she’d soon be saying shit frequently, because current dire circumstances were going to require her to grow up fast.

The heart is deceitful above all things.’

“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”

Amity knew that the heart was deceitful above all things, but she also knew that the heart was a lonely hunter, that the heart was slow to learn, that the heart was an open house with its doors widely flung. Because she’d read enough books to bring an elephant to its knees if they were stacked on its back, and because writers had so much to say about the human heart, she knew a gajillion truths about the heart, many of them in conflict with one another.

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. A laugh said, You can’t scare me into surrender, I’ll fight you hard to the end.

In each man, an inherent kindness revealed itself in countless small ways.

sometimes you could want a thing too fiercely. The excessive passion of your yearning could blind you to the mistakes you made, so that in the end, you were defeated by the sheer power of your need.

The first morning color in the sky was a symbol of hope, a reminder that in spite of the evil that worked relentlessly from pole to pole, the world spent the night turning inexorably toward light.

She didn’t want to be one of those girls, the kind without enough fortitude in the face of adversity. It was always nice, however, in the middle of an epic quest, to have a respite with, say, a kindly retired couple—she having once been a maid to a princess, and he having been a former foundry man who had forged armor for the bravest knights—who would invite you into their cottage in the enchanted forest to share their dinner and then have a pipe and a snifter of brandy by the fire, with two good dogs snoring by the warm hearth. After that convivial evening and a safe sleep in a goose-down bed while the dogs stood guard against witches and warlocks, you were fortified and ready to carry on at any cost. Instead, what she had was a pantry with canned goods and bags of dried beans that made her want to fart just by looking at them. She was alone and afraid and on the brink of being dispirited.

A quiet desperation overcame her as she realized that there would be no end of searching, that she would never find the final and true version of mother, father, husband, child, or self.

The supreme evil kingdom of Mordor wasn’t just a place in Tolkien’s imagination. It was real. It always had been real. It was here and it was everywhere men sought absolute power over others.