The Crooked Staircase Quotes

“None of us ever has more than this moment. Tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday. The best I can do for my boy is give him enough todays that he can make a past for himself that will have had some meaning in it.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“There’s not much news in the news anymore. The lies they tell don’t leave a lot of time for the facts about anything.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“I hate the people who think we’re just part of the great unwashed”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“Furies, Alecto. In classic mythology, Tisiphone and Megaera and Alecto, daughters of the earth goddess Gaea, punished crimes in the name of the victims.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“I think to myself, I play to myself, and nobody knows what I say to myself.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“Border to border, from sea to shining sea, police cars and other government vehicles had for some time been equipped with 360-degree license-plate-scanning systems that recorded the numbers of the vehicles around them, whether parked or in motion, transmitting them 24/7 to regional archives, which in turn shared the information with the National Security Agency’s vast intelligence troves in its million-square-foot Utah Data Center.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“a touchstone by which they both could test their commitment to what was good and true in a world of darkness and lies. But a touchstone had value only if they acted with reason, from a sense of duty, rather than because sentimentality overtook them.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“Tomorrow becomes today, today becomes yesterday.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“Charismatic crusaders of that kind were doomed even in triumph, destroyed by exalted ambition if not by pride.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“Rain beating on the roof like the booted feet of marching legions,”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“seeding social chaos so the public would cry out for order. This would allow a steady ratcheting up of security measures and rights restrictions”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“At forty-four, though bitter, she was nonetheless grateful that she hadn’t been rendered penniless. Having clawed her way to the top once before, she’d been left with just enough assets to start the climb again. This time she would not make the mistake that had led to her ruin; she would not marry.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“is owned”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“Like most modern art, they interested her no more than did the wind-tangled rain-compacted sun-bleached trash that time accumulated in vomitous-looking masses along California’s cracked and potholed highways, as the once-golden state stewed in government corruption on its way to bankruptcy.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“who would no doubt define faux pas as “the father of my enemy.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“They were good at enduring: adversity was the touchstone by which they proved their value to themselves.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“...it was clear to Jane that Sara, in spite of her intelligence and fortitude, had internalized those words and could not bleach them from the stained self-image with which Simon had left her.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“We grow, we change, we labor to maturity, to what little wisdom we might ever acquire, but always in the mirror is who we were as well as who we are, a harking back and, yet again, a quiet reckoning.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“Being an evoker of apprehension was a core part of a sociopath’s self-image.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“He’d covered the lens with a piece of blue painter’s tape. But rumors abounded that computers made in the past two years, which his had been, contained a second, hidden camera—a so-called Orwell eye—that looked out from behind the screen.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“in the perpetual struggle of good and evil, the latter must be resisted without fail.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“lèse majesté?”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“strategy involved disguising their operations as the work of terrorists and madmen, seeding social chaos so the public would cry out for order. This would allow a steady ratcheting up of security measures and rights restrictions until such a day that even those who had not been adjusted with brain implants would celebrate the firm but enlightened rule of their betters.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“reach back and tear her off, like some mad turtle offended by its own shell.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“the trappings of such clandestine work, the code names and passwords and hush-hush and hugger-mugger, the secrets within secrets, the ciphers and signals and signs.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“This British historian, Paul Johnson, he wrote a great book about them,” Jane said. “It’ll scare the piss out of you.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“He’s one of those dangerous people that we call sociopaths. He fakes being human, because he lacks all the emotions you and I feel. He cares only about himself, and if he felt he could get away with it, he would commit any atrocity you can imagine, without remorse.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“California’s cracked and potholed highways, as the once-golden state stewed in government corruption on its way to bankruptcy.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“nothing smaller would so reliably stop an assailant.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase

“time accumulated in vomitous-looking masses along California’s cracked and potholed highways, as the once-golden state stewed in government corruption on its way to bankruptcy.”
― Dean Koontz, The Crooked Staircase