Wilderness Quotes

“One thing seemed to suggest that I might have some wisp of beauty to offer the world: the nature of my heart, which remained free of bitterness and anger. I feared, but I did not hate. I knew dread, but I did not judge. I loved and wished to be loved in return. And though my life had been circumscribed, though my experience had been limited by the threats I faced, I was usually happy. In this world, where woe and misery were common, where sometimes darkness seemed about to drown civilization, perhaps a capacity for happiness and hope was beauty of a kind, a small welcome light in the flood.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“My life would be constrained by the horror and fierce rage that my appearance inspired, but I would know peace as well as fear, tenderness as well as brutality, and even love in a time of cruelty.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“Much of the world is beautiful, and much more is at least fair to the eye, and what might be ugly is nevertheless of the same texture as everything else and clearly belongs in the tapestry.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“Each life is a spool of thread that unravels through the years, and it is by a thread that we are so perilously suspended.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“The imagination can be a kind of wilderness, too, in fact a wasteland, if you allow it to take you into one bleak and grotesque place after another, for you can imagine yourself into all kinds of paranoid delusions and even into madness.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“in time I came to see that of the many kinds of wilderness, the human heart can be the bleakest and the most hostile. Many hearts contain great beauty and the smallest measure of darkness. In many other hearts, beauty brightens only remote corners where otherwise darkness rules. There are those in whom no darkness lies, though they are few. And others have purged from their inner selves all light and have welcomed into themselves the void; their kind are to be found everywhere, though they are often difficult to recognize, for they are cunning.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“If she could seldom bring herself to touch me and even more seldom look at me directly, she nonetheless made a place for me in her life.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“The rabid ferocity of his reaction had confirmed Mother’s warnings, but I didn’t yet comprehend the depth of the revulsion that I inspired or how relentless he would be in his determination to kill me.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness

“That long-ago day, when I was only eight, I didn’t arrive at this realization, but in time I came to see that of the many kinds of wilderness, the human heart can be the bleakest and the most hostile. Many hearts contain great beauty and the smallest measure of darkness. In many other hearts, beauty brightens only remote corners where otherwise darkness rules. There are those in whom no darkness lies, though they are few. And others have purged from their inner selves all light and have welcomed into themselves the void; their kind are to be found everywhere, though they are often difficult to recognize, for they are cunning.”
― Dean Koontz, Wilderness