Light Has Weight, but Darkness Does Not (Nameless: Season Two #4)

by Dean Koontz

She’s never spent much time brooding about what happens because there’s no changing the way it went down or accounting for what’s occurred. But in this instance, the turn of events beggars belief and crowns the night with meaning that she will never have the genius to interpret.

grossly evil people or very stupid people—or evil stupid people—are in charge of almost everything, and the good smart people are afraid to oppose them because the evil people are vicious and the stupid people are too clueless to see where all this is going, and the people who are both evil and stupid, well, they’re the worst of all.

Wishing another person dead doesn’t make your own life any longer; it just makes it meaner.

When they believe your lie is the truth, when they fail to see that the freedom you claim to champion is in fact slavery disguised, they’ll live by whatever rules you imply without realizing they’re being obedient.

those who believe in nothing for long enough will eventually believe in anything.

Most people satisfy themselves by strongly opposing little evils, like hurtful words and unpopular ideas and gluttony, where the risk of angering violent people is low.

It seems like most everyone has taken up several causes each and spends a lot of time shouting to one another about how virtuous they are without noticing that in spite of all this loud righteousness, just about everything is getting worse—maybe not in spite of it, but because of it.

when so many people take so much pride in their rectitude, there’s a perilous shortage of humility. Humble people know that no one can know everything, so they are less likely to saddle up and ride off a cliff just because the prideful have agreed their virtue requires everyone to believe that horses can fly. Humility is the mortar of civilization.

It is the history of evil people that they first seek to destroy innocence because innocence is beauty, and then seek to destroy what is merely beautiful because it reminds them of the innocence they have forsaken.

the world is a library and every person in it is an entire shelf of stories.

Sometimes I think what prevents the darkness from coming down on us even faster is laughing at it. Evil withers at mockery, don’t you think?”