The Black Angel Quotes

“Good will attract good to itself, and those involved will unite toward a common goal. Evil, in turn, draws evil men, but they will never truly act as one. They will always be distrustful, always jealous. Ultimately, they seek power for themselves alone, and for that reason they will always fall apart at the end.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“After all, what is hell but the eternal absence of God? To exist in a hellish state is to be denied forever the promise of hope, of redemption, of love. To those who have been forsaken, hell has no geography.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“Most criminals are kind of dumb, which is why they’re criminals. If they weren’t criminals, they’d be doing something else to screw up people’s lives, like running elections in Florida”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“Theirs was a human evil, a product of their own flawed natures. Faulty genetics might have played a part in what they became, or childhood abuse. Tiny blood vessels in the brain corrupting, or little neurons misfiring, could have contributed to their debased natures. But free will also played a part, for I did not doubt that a time came for most of those men and women when they stood over another human being and held a life in the palms of their hands, a fragile thing glowing hesitantly, beating furiously its claim upon the world, and made a decision to snuff it out, to ignore the cries and whimpers and the slow, descending cadence of the final breaths, until at last the blood stopped pumping and instead flowed slowly from the wounds, pooling around them and reflecting their faces in its deep, sticky redness. It was there that the true evil lay, in the moment between thought and action, between intent and commission, when for a fleeting instant there was still the possibility that one might turn away and refuse to appease the dark, gaping desire within. Perhaps it was in this moment that human wretchedness encountered something worse, something deeper and older that was both familiar in the resonance that it found within our souls, yet alien in its nature and its antiquity, an evil that predated our own and dwarfed it with its magnitude. There are as many forms of evil in the world as there are men to commit them, and its gradations are near infinite, but it may be that, in truth, it all draws from the same deep well, and there are beings that have supped from it for far longer than any of us could ever imagine.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“But what of the lives that I had taken? Was I not equally culpable, and was that not why there now so many names, of both good men and bad, carved upon that palimpsest I bore, and for each of which I might justifiably be called to account? I could argue that by committing a smaller evil, I had prevented a greater one from occurring, but I would still bear the mark of that sin upon me, and perhaps be dammed for it. Yet, in the end, I could not stand by. There were sins that I had committed out of anger, touched by wrath, and for those I had no doubt that I would at last be charged and found wanting. But, the others? I chose to act as I did, believing that the greater evil lay in doing nothing. I have tried to make reparation, in my way.
The problem is that, like cancer, a little corruption of the soul will eventually spread throughout the whole.
The problem is that there are no small evils.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“be close to another human being at that instant was enough to convince one, however briefly, that something beyond understanding passed from the body with that final sigh, that some essence began its journey from this world to another.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“God would even have forgiven Judas Iscariot, had he asked for His forgiveness. Judas wasn’t damned for betraying Christ. He was damned for despairing, for rejecting the possibility that he might be forgiven for what he had done.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“God, they were only children when they went off to fight, virgins, and virgin children had no call to be holding guns and firing them at other children. When he looked at his grandchildren, and saw how cosseted and naïve they were despite the air of knowingness that they maintained, he found it impossible to visualize them as he had once been.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“were pressed into service, although”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“The Catholic Church was not short of lawyers, especially in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as anyone who had dealt with the archdiocese in the course of the recent abuse scandals could attest.”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel

“Así eran las vidas:
cuando sus caminos se cruzaban, quedaban alteradas para siempre por el
encuentro, unas veces de una manera leve, casi invisible, y otras de forma tan profunda que ya nada podía ser después igual. El residuo de otras vidas nos contagia, y nosotros a nuestra vez lo transmitimos a quienes encontramos más adelante”
― John Connolly, The Black Angel