Ashley Bell Quotes

“Home is where the heart is. No, nothing quite as simple as that. Home is where you struggle, in a world of endless struggle, to become the best you can be, and it becomes home in your heart only if one day you can look back and say that, in spite of all your faults and failures, it was in this special place where you began to see, however dimly, the shape of your soul.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“You should have more faith in fiction. It lets you come sideways at the truth, which is the only way anyone ever gets near it.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Storytelling can heal broken hearts and damaged minds.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“she understood as never before that home wasn’t a place but rather a place in the heart. In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Dogs needed no words to console you. Dogs were the ultimate practitioners of the therapy of touch. Dogs knew and accepted the hard realities of life that human beings could not acknowledge until those obvious truths were exhaustively described with words, and even then there was often more bitter acknowledgment than humble acceptance.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“People hide truths about themselves from themselves. Such self-deception is a coping mechanism, and to one extent or another, most people begin deceiving themselves when they're children.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“There is no adult terror equivalent to what an innocent child experiences when first confronted with the truth that evil is not merely a figment of fairy tales, that it walks the world in countless forms, and that what it seeks most aggressively is the destruction of the innocent.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Home is where you struggle, in a world of endless struggle, to become the best you can be, and it becomes home in your heart only if one day you can look back and say that, in spite of all your faults and failures, it was in this special place where you began to see, however dimly, the shape of your soul.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“You've got today, and there's all of time and all the world in today.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“One thing we’ve noticed is these days people see all kinds of things they don’t want to see, so they go blind.”
“Selectively blind.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“The blend she preferred was fragrant and so rich in caffeine that the fumes alone would cure narcolepsy.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Her imagination was such that she could hear the song of the bird when it was still but a yolk in an egg.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Good men and women sought calm, peace, time for reflection. Evil people were eternally restive, intractable, always eager for more thrills, which were the same few thrills endlessly repeated, because the evil were unimaginative, acting on feelings rather than reason. Forever agitated, they were unaware that the cause of their fury was the confining narrowness of the worldview they crafted for themselves, its emptiness. There would never be an end to them—and always a need for men and women willing to resist them at whatever cost.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“People go through life failing to see all sorts of amazing things because they aren’t expecting to see them.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“With human beings, a natural death was a death with dignity. But animals were innocents, and as their stewards, people owed them mercy.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“watching the sea as it carried to shore millions of fragments of the sun and cast them, cooled and foaming, on the sand.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“The ineffable would not be ineffable if it could be described.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“War,” Pax said, “either dulls the mind to despair or sharpens it toward intuitive truths.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Endeavor to live the life.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Everyone, Pax believed, was more than she or he appeared to be, and one of the saddest things about the human condition was that most people never realized what talents, capacities, and depth they possessed. That Pogo had taken a full measure of himself must be one reason that Bibi so loved him.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“The next one’s also from Thoreau. ‘If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“Humanity is capable of any atrocity,” she said. “But when you understand the extent of this cruelty, the unprecedented viciousness, the immense scale of the horror, it seems beyond the power of mere people to conceive and execute. It seems demonic.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“By the time Bibi reached her bedroom, she understood as never before that home wasn’t a place but rather a place in the heart. In this troubled world, everything was transient except what we could carry with us in our minds and hearts. Every home ceased to be a home sooner or later, but not with its demolition. It survived destruction as long as just one person who had loved it still lived. Home was the story of what happened there, not the story of where it happened.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“To achieve your goals, imagination was almost as important as hard work. You couldn’t win the prize if you couldn’t imagine what it was and where it might be found.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“As a writer, Bibi, you could be a doctor of the soul.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“She told him that she wished he would come to life for her, the way that he had come to life in the wonderful story, and she really did wish it, want it, need it. She could so clearly see him rising from the page of the book as he had risen from the baker’s tray before setting out into the city. When the incident began, it was pure Disney. But not for long.”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell

“short work of fiction by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel.” Imagine an infinite number of rooms, stacked atop one another, in which are stored not only all the books ever written but also all the books that ever will be, each of them in every dialect of every language known to mankind and of every language yet to be learned or formed in days to come. In addition, there is a book of the life of everyone who has ever lived or will live, and an infinite number of other volumes of all genres and purposes that could be imagined. There are books that make no sense and books that seem to make sense but perhaps do not. And the sheer quantity ensures that no one can read a sufficient percentage of it to arrive at an explanation of the library, life, or anything else. Bibi”
― Dean Koontz, Ashley Bell