Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

This was all I knew of those men until, years later and running for my life, I visited one of them with the hope of learning some small detail that might be a clue as to who and what I am.

They had not yet been able to sell a significant number of paintings because, as they explained, the art establishment valued the marketability of the artist’s image as much as or more than his or her paintings, so the big breakthrough depended on finding the right look.

These days, America is a lot more policed at the federal level than it was only a decade earlier.

Get your shit together, amigo. But keep your sense of humor or you’ll go insane, like so many seem to have done these days.”

every police car and a lot of other government vehicles are equipped with scanners that record license plates all around them and transmit in real time to the National Security Agency’s million-square-foot data center in Utah.

I have always been an optimist, because pessimists seldom have any fun and usually fret their way into one of the horrible fates they spend their lives worrying about.

But the optimist, unlike the pessimist, believes that life has meaning, that there is something to learn from every adversity, and even that the absurdity of such an excess of misfortune will likely seem at least somewhat amusing after enough time has passed. That is why, years after they have lost everything, optimists are frequently richer and happier than ever, while pessimists often had nothing to lose in the first place.

I am not an angry person, and neither am I given to violence when I am in full control of my extremities. However, there is only so much abuse a person can endure in one day before he goes John Wick on his tormentors.

Grief should drive you to your knees, but if you stay there forever, you’re saying you know better than God how the world should work. And you don’t.”

It is human nature to know we die and still to disbelieve it; otherwise, we might not carry on.

They say that ignorance is bliss. I think ignorance is the mother of extreme behavior, ensuring either a colorless and tedious life or one of passionate commitment to foolishness of one kind or another.

“A lot of people these days are the opposite of what they say they are, and a lot of them probably don’t even realize it. They’re opposed to racism even as they act like racists. They’re opposed to fascism, even as they act like fascists. The world’s gone weird.”

My sense was that if I didn’t answer the call to battle, the war would come to me anyway. This was a matter of destiny. If I gave destiny the finger and walked away, that wouldn’t be the end of it. What would have happened would still happen. The malevolent beings that I’d had a chance to stand up against would crush me without resistance. That was how fate worked. It wasn’t pretty. I had no desire to pull the sword Excalibur from the stone, but if I didn’t, the stone and the sword would roll downhill and flatten me.

I love this country. This is the greatest country in the world, as long as it will be allowed to last.

On the other side are fools who think a world of pure materialism will be a utopia. The Screamers will give them the world they want, a world of absolute indulgence—and rule it. Too late, they’ll realize their utopia is in fact an empire of suffering and death.”

“Quinn, dear, you’ll have moments when you’re mean and you hurt people’s feelings, just as they’ll hurt yours. You’ll do stupid things, maybe even something cruel now and then. But you’ll never murder anyone.”

“Defending your family or your country in a war, you might have to kill, but killing in defense of your own life or the lives of innocent people isn’t murder.”

“You must be all right if a dog will associate with you. Dogs can always be trusted.”

I understood the world wasn’t just a movie screen, wasn’t just flat, there was depth to it, strangeness and meaning. I don’t know what meaning, but it’s something big, and I’m a part of it.

When feverish politics and demented ideology entwine, those who are not well anchored to the beliefs that allow a civil society can be swept away, becoming part of the storm of madness that lays waste to everything.

Writing novels seems like a glamorous and exciting occupation, although in reality I suspect that it’s a lot less glamorous than professional wrestling and only marginally more exciting than being a librarian.

“Increasingly, everywhere in the world, people are not governed by those who wish to serve them, but ruled by those mad with power and determined to have total submission. They seem ever more fiercely inspired to greater ruthlessness. They call their hatred justice and see it as a virtue.

Your special talents come with an obligation, a serious one. Both of you have a duty to use them for the purpose you were given, a duty to your country, the world, humanity. Duty isn’t to be taken lightly. Get over yourselves and get your asses in gear.”

The moon was high, yet the desert remained shrouded in gloom. In that wasteland, it seemed we might be traveling backward in time, searching for a lost Eden to which no paved or unpaved road would ever bring us.

How odd it seemed that making a mortal commitment of mind and heart and soul should be at one and the same time deeply satisfying and terrifying. Movies hadn’t prepared me for that dichotomy. In fact, I was beginning to suspect that movies hadn’t prepared me for much of anything.

“We need to have the ability—the right—to make our own choices, even though we make mistakes. We learn from our mistakes, or we should. Scientists learn from their mistakes, and that’s how science advances. Trial and error. Without error, there would be no progress.”

“It’s a package deal,” she said. “Free will and freedom itself require the problem of evil. People who are truly grown up, not just in years but also in their minds and hearts, understand that freedom can’t exist without the choice between right and wrong. To be free, we accept the problem of evil—and then resist it.”

Resistance didn’t seem enough to me. “Maybe someday aliens from another planet, like thousands of years more advanced than us, will show up, and they’ll have figured out how to do everything right and how to stop people from ever making mistakes, doing the wrong thing, and then they can teach us.”

“You better hope they don’t show up, Quinn. Such a race would be a hive. A tiny ruling class, certain of its moral superiority, would have obliterated the free will of the drones, crushed those who resisted. They would...

I, still a callow youth at nineteen, knew that conflating newness and art would ensure the production of bad art, which indeed was everywhere

Those who create in protest against the history of art do not stand on the shoulders of giants, but on the treacherous ground of their own pretensions.

We are what we are, and we need to have faith in that.”

To those who lack a conscience, there is no such thing as remorse.

She had gone missing because she had been abducted.

He was surely lost forever, with no route back to a rational existence.

suggested that the evil he committed was perpetrated with the frivolous intent of a dull boy who lacked the intelligence to grasp the consequences of his actions, a game-show savant whose extensive knowledge of trivia revealed a mind that was nothing but a warehouse of meaningless facts, where there was no capacity to know good from evil. Yet he was not stupid. Perhaps developmentally disabled in a moral sense. Or his conscience had been eaten away by the cancer of narcissism.

As she lowered the fingered veil, the look she gave me was fashioned poorly, too extreme in its representation of a shy and simple person. She was as blank faced and empty eyed as a simpleton, and she definitely was not that.

The Nihilim do not leave behind a monstrous corpse. They die as Rishon, preserving the secret of the first universe and the fact of their intrusion into this one.

On even the most terrible occasions, good people find new strengths in themselves and rise to meet the ugliest of challenges. That is why I have hope that the worst things that we’ve foreseen can be forestalled or might never come to pass.

Right now the world needs saving more than changing.

I must guard against righteous anger becoming something darker. I understand why the world is shapen as it is, that we should have free will and be more than ants, that we must know evil if we’re also to know good.

My anger must forever be a shield, not a weapon. Love is the only wooden stake that will change an evil heart; we must sharpen it and keep it ready in the name of those we’ve lost,

Anger and the action it inspires must be reserved for those whose hearts will not relent from the idolatry of power.