The Friend of the Family Quotes

“You can’t be insulted by a skunk when it sprays you. It’s just a scared little animal that has no weapon but its stink.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Having money of one’s own was miraculous, and giving it away was more fun than I would have imagined back when I didn’t have any. “It’s not a sin to live well if you’ve earned it,” Loretta told me. “But it’s shameful not to share. The two most dangerous human flaws are greed and envy.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Mass murderers and thieves sleep as soundly as people who have done the right thing every day of their lives.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“What still haunts me is the raucous laughter with which the audience rewarded him, such pitiless laughter ripe with contempt for those who, like me, were weak and less blessed by Nature than the Blue Mood patrons in all their finery. Arrogant laughter born from vanity and ignorance is no less frightening than the shrieking and shouting of an enraged mob bearing torches and pitchforks.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“To believe that the human conscience can guarantee a stable and worthy society is akin to the delusion that the arc of the universe bends toward justice. Forever expanding in all directions, the universe has no arc, and in many people the human conscience is as atrophied as their appendix.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“eidolon, a phantom shaped by a sleeper’s mind.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Happiness and despair are choices to be made. If I hadn’t embraced books and lived in the worlds within their pages, I might have sunk into despair, unable to see the light even when it shone.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“I felt as if I were in an English novel, in a story rife with challenges and travails that would nonetheless end in justice and gladness.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“The relationship with a good dog is closer to perfection than that with another human rarely manages to be. They are innocent, and we are not. They ask so little of us, but give so much.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“We exist now as we have always existed, as everyone now alive exists if they dare to admit it—forever in a mystery so strange and so profound that it cannot be solved. Such is the world.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Grief can never be adequately described, and every effort to do so diminishes it. The best of novelists tell us that grief will in time subside from painful, excruciating anguish to enduring sorrow that takes a more modest toll of the heart.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Enjoy life but stay alert. Always trust in the rightness of the world. But stay alert. Never be bitter or despairing. But stay alert. Life is a great gift. Love and mercy are the promise of it. But stay alert.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Bulge.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Hollywood usually treats a fast-talking guy with a good-looking girl on his arm as if he’s a genius and she’s pretty damn smart in her own right for recognizing his potential. It’s pathetic, but that’s how it was, is, and probably always will be. So”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“The two most dangerous human flaws are greed and envy. Some unfortunate people have both, and therein lies the cause of all wars, most murders, and untold suffering.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Sometimes it might seem that hope is for fools, but it is only such fools who have any chance of making it through the long night to a new dawn.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Tradesmen who live by their skills, laborers who earn their way with muscle and hard work, farmers, salesmen, secretaries—I’ve never known any who surrendered their precious common sense to an ideology. But in my experience and Loretta’s, a certain kind of person finds the academic world not merely prestigious but also glamorous, a throne of power. They believe ideas are more important than people. They relish the chance not to encourage young minds to be independent thinkers, but instead to grind and polish them into mirror images of the teacher’s prejudices and”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Enjoy life—that’s what I learned. But stay alert. Always trust in the rightness of the world. But stay alert. Never be bitter or despairing. Life is a great gift. Love and mercy are the promise of life. But stay alert. Remember everything we do spins off good luck and bad luck for other people, so don’t do what’s obviously stupid or wicked. Eleven years, and that’s all I’ve got. It’s more than nothing, but it doesn’t seem like much.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Yet an aspect of her expression and a sharpness in her eyes suggested she was suspicious of me. Experience—and many novels—had taught me that if people regard you with suspicion when no credible reason exists to do so, they are keeping from you a secret that you need to know and that it is they who have earned suspicion.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Who was I, after all, but books well remembered and memories well forgotten?”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“every free”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“some ideas might even repulse us until we realize we are reacting with a bias that we should want to shed.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Fairchilds were motivated by rejection as much as they were inspired by success.”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“When you have hope”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were—I have not seen As others saw. —Edgar Allan Poe”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Sometimes it might seem that hope is for fools”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“cried in bed that night. I cried”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Other people make our luck”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Experience—and many novels—had taught me that if people regard you with suspicion when no credible reason exists to do so”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family

“Who was I”
― Dean Koontz, The Friend of the Family