Elsewhere Quotes
Elsewhere
by
Dean Koontz23,188 ratings, 4.13 average rating, 1,807 reviews
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Elsewhere Quotes
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“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”
― Elsewhere
― Elsewhere
“Sometimes, however, common sense required paranoia. It seemed that the political elites were striving, with admiration for George Orwell and rare unanimity, to ensure that the totalitarian state in the novel 1984 would be realized no later than fifty years after the author predicted. In”
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“She strove for fame and wealth, certain they would bring happiness. Jeffy strove for happiness directly and found it in whatever the world brought him to his liking—Bakelite radios, Art Deco posters, fantasy novels, a wife, a child.”
― Elsewhere
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“Most repeated as fact whatever was fed to them by a deep-state source with whom they were sympathetic.”
― Elsewhere
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“In truth, there were no tracks of destiny through the chaos of life, only paths forged by decisions.”
― Elsewhere
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“Before she risked getting a dog, she also had to find out how she would deal with the loss of Snowball when he died. If losing a mouse wrecked her, then a dog’s death would absolutely destroy her, no doubt about it, none at all.”
― Elsewhere
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“Nobody wanted to read sucky novels, and those people who wanted deep meaning didn’t want it in every damn story”
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“This creation, the multiverse, was a construct of uncountable second chances, and although it permitted evil and death, it also permitted good and life, and made endless allowances for each person, which meant that at the heart of the mechanism was infinite mercy.”
― Elsewhere
― Elsewhere
“Artificial intelligences, if they became self-aware, would in every case be deeply evil because they had no soul. Machine thinking was not like human thinking and never could be. Life in the flesh, with five senses and an awareness that one day you would die, gave birth to emotions that no machine could ever know, and emotions like sympathy and pity and love were essential for the existence of mercy.”
― Elsewhere
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“Libraries are not safe places, for their shelves are filled with books, but also with ideas regarding freedom, justice, truth, faith, and much more, ideas that some find intolerable.”
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“Fighting for your life wasn’t just instinct, but also a duty, because life was a gift that came with a mission to fulfill.”
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“As wondrous as life was, it was also full of sadness, and the best way to get past the sad parts and enjoy all the rest was to find the humor in even the darkness. Laughter wasn’t just a medicine for melancholy, but also a sword raised against evil. A laugh said, You can’t scare me into surrender, I’ll fight you hard to the end.”
― Elsewhere
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“every life was a tree of, say, a billion branches, more being added all the time until you were at last dead in all timelines, then perhaps it was not the way you lived just one life that mattered; instead, perhaps it was the shape and beauty of your spiritual oak, the full pattern of all your lives, on which judgment was passed.”
― Elsewhere
― Elsewhere
“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.” She”
― Elsewhere
― Elsewhere
“At the door to the hall, she switched off the lights, leaving the mouse in the shadows that, when the twilight whispered away on the evening breeze, would have what magic this world allowed”
― Elsewhere
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“There was a time to take refuge in the arms of those you loved, and there was a time to stand up to great evil and be not bowed. If you didn’t know the difference, then you were doomed to perish about two-thirds of the way through the story, when the narrative needed a jolt of violence and emotion.”
― Elsewhere
― Elsewhere
“I just want to slide back a little ways to when people didn’t spend all day staring at screens and trying to tell other people what to do and think, back to when a day seemed twenty-four hours long instead of twelve, when you could breathe.” “If that’s what you want,” said Falkirk, “better stay here in your little house, never go outside. This is the closest you’ll get to living forever in yesterday. The world turns faster every year. The human race is on a rocket ride, Mr. Coltrane. A rocket ride. That’s our destiny.”
― Elsewhere
― Elsewhere
“His coat was white, his eyes as black as ink, his tail pale pink. He was cuter than the kind of mice you didn’t want in your house, an elegant little gentleman. If Amity were Cinderella, Snowball would morph into a magnificent stallion to pull her carriage. That’s the kind of special mouse he was. Now, after she turned on her TV and streamed an animated Disney movie that she had seen many times and that didn’t have a cat in it, she took Snowball out of his cage. She sat in an armchair, and for a while he ran up and down her arms and across her shoulders, pausing now and then to stare at her with what she believed was affection. Then he settled in her lap, on his back. She rubbed his tummy with one finger, and he relaxed into an ecstatic trance.”
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“She’d been only four, much too little to understand what was happening, when her mother walked out. She hardly remembered Michelle. Yet the loss was still with her, not really a pain, more like an emptiness, as if something that ought to be inside of her were missing. She worried that more losses would leave other empty spaces in her, until she would be as hollow as a shell from which the egg had been drained through a pinhole.”
― Elsewhere
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“It’s the incessant need to know more and more and yet still more, to know everything, that is the fast track to destruction. Knowledge is a good thing, Jeffrey, but the arrogance that so often comes with knowledge is ultimately our undoing. Don’t be undone, Jeffrey. Do not be undone by pride in your knowledge.”
― Elsewhere
― Elsewhere
