The Taking Quotes

“Maybe there's nothing impossible tonight. We're down the hole to Wonderland, and no White Rabbit to guide us."
If I remember correctly, the White Rabbit was an unreliable guide, anyway.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Reality isn't what it used to be.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“...like a scene from the swamps of Louisiana or the mind of Poe on opium.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“The human imagination may be the most elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of dreams that in centuries of relectless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Futility is in the eye of the beholder.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“The corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?” —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“We don't call them inmates,' Molly said, quoting one of the psychiatrists.'We call them patients.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“We are born with the dead: See, they return and bring us with them.” —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Then she looked into the shepherd’s eyes and saw what is to be seen in every dog’s eyes if it has not been broken by a cruel master: trust, strength without arrogance, a desire to give and receive affection—and an honesty so pure that deception, if contemplated, cannot be perpetrated.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simple, self-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Probably they prefer we don't see them, but they want us to know what's happening with the weather because fear debilitates. Maybe they want us frightened, cowering, and pliable.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“we’ve become hollow men, stuffed men, heads filled with straw, no convictions or higher purpose…and for hollow men, the world will end not with a bang but a whimper.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“His dreams were killing him.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Throughout their seven years of marriage, they had conducted their lives by different clocks. She dwelled as much in the future as in the present, envisioning where she wished to go, relentlessly mapping the path that ought to lead to her high goals. Her strong mainspring was wound tight. Neil lived in the moment. To him, the far future was next week, and he trusted time to take him there whether or not he planned the journey. They”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“pitapatation”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“The cumulative effect was a whisper of such insidious subtlety that it almost seemed to arise within her head, less like a real sound than like an auditory hallucination.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“glistering”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“gibbous”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“Pathoformic.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“She stiffened her resolve with a line of Eliot’s verse: Life you may evade, but Death you shall not.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“By rejecting the fundamentals of the very civilization that made possible its rise, modernism and its philosophical stepchildren offered flash in place of genuine beauty, sensation in place of hope.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“If some hopped-up loser, desperate for drug money or violent sex, broke into your house, you could be killed five times over in thirty-two minutes. Consequently, most of these people were prepared to defend themselves—and with enthusiasm.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“without a clear purpose, without a long-term plan, she felt adrift.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“every moment of every day, depending on the faith we embrace, each of us continues to live either by the merciful sufferance of God or at the whim of blind chance and indifferent nature.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“In a troubled culture where cream often settled on the bottom and the palest milk rose to the top,”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“that every moment of every day, depending on the faith we embrace, each of us continues to live either by the merciful sufferance of God or at the whim of blind chance and indifferent nature. She”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“hope; like calcium, hope was part of the structure of her bones.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking

“The silence of a fly in amber, of a fossil hidden in the heart of a stone, lay upon Black Lake.”
― Dean Koontz, The Taking