The House at the End of the World

by Dean Koontz

An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul. ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’”

This is an age when freedoms are fragile. Those in power speak loudly, ceaselessly about compassion but rarely exhibit any.

“Do you really believe the past is past? I think the past might be our future, that we’re busy laying the groundwork for new Dachaus, new Auschwitzes, all in the name of compassion, progress, justice, prosperity. Of the hard lessons that humanity learns, how many are retained? How very few? The passion of angry ideologues, the ignorance of the arrogant, the ferocity of utopians—how can such people lead the world to anything but its end?”

Paranoia can be a serious mental illness.

Fear is useful when it’s on a leash, Avi once said, but it’s always a bad dog when you let it run free in your mind.

Katie feels as if she’s gone down the rabbit hole, where she and the Mad Hatter are conversing without the amenities of tea and table.

“‘I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing

But one thing I know—just when you think it’s over for you, it isn’

Everything’s hanging by a thread.

We can’t give in to evil, to those who do such things, because what they want is us to go still and quiet and never speak back to them.

Fear is useful when it’s on a leash, but it’s always a bad dog when you let it run free in your mind.