Quotessence
Home / Authors / John Connolly
John Connolly

John Connolly Quotes

Writer

Filter quotes by topic

AllEvilPeopleMenGoodIfsJohn ConnollyPainChildrenLifeSaid

Famous John Connolly Quotes

“There are people whose eyes you must avoid, whose attention you must not draw to yourself. They are strange, parasitic creatures, lost souls seeking to stretch across the abyss and make fatal contact with the warm, constant flow of humanity. They live in pain and exist only to visit that pain on others. A random glance, the momentary lingering of a look, is enough to give them the excuse they seek.”

EvilKillersEyesLost Souls
Book:The Killing Kind
Create image

“If there is anything worse than evil, it is nothingness. At least evil has a form, and a voice, and a purpose, however depraved. Perhaps some good can even come out of evil: a terrible deed of violence against someone weaker may lead others to act in order to ensure that such a deed is not perpetrated again, whereas before they might have been unaware of the reasons why an individual might behave in such a way, or they might simply have chosen to ignore them. And evil, as we saw with the Blacksmith, always contains within itself the possibility of its own redemption. It is not evil that is the enemy of hope: it is nothingness.”

HumanityEvilGoodRedemptionNothingnessNothingGood Vs EvilRedeemEvil Deeds
Book:The Infernals
Create image

“Samuel understood at last why this being hated men and women so much: he hated them because they were so like himself, because the worst of the was mirrored in them. He was the source of all that was bad in men and women, but he had none of the greatness, and none of the grace, of which human beings were capable, so that by only by corrupting them was his own pain diminished, and thus his existence made more tolerable.”

PainEvilDarkHellVirtueGraceGreatnessDevilHatredMiseryCorruptionGoodGood And EvilBadViceThe DevilThe Great Malevolence
Book:The Infernals
Create image

“But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere." "'They?' Who are 'they?'" "I don't know. Just people." "That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifies the means.' Is that what you believe?”

LoveWarPowerfulVictoryJustifyFairnessUnfairDefeatedPowerlessUnfairnessFairVictoriousLove And WarJustifyingJustifying ViolenceAll Is Fair In Love And WarJustificaiton
Book:The Infernals
Create image

“I can’t go with you,’ he told her. ‘Whatever you have to face down there, you must face it alone.’ ‘I understand.’ And she did. It didn’t mean she wasn’t scared, but she was stronger now, altered forever by this journey. The Ceres who had first arrived would not have been capable of walking through that doorway - or more correctly, would not have believed herself capable of it, which was not the same thing. That Ceres was lost, and melancholic, but had forgotten for a while that this was the human condition: often to be lost, confused or anxious, but finally to comprehend that, at crucial instances, we will find ourselves lost precisely where we were meant to be; that there is little of use to be learned from the familiar - only from what is strange and new; and that everything worth experiencing or embracing is, because unknown, first touched by fear.”

InspirationalFearHuman ConditionJohn ConnollyTlolt
Book:The Land of Lost Things
Create image

“The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: It's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do.”

SufferingCompassionSuffer
Book:Dark Hollow
Create image

“It is a curious fact that small boys are more terrified of their babysitters than small girls are. In part, this is because small girls and babysitters, who are usually slightly larger girls, belong to the same species, and therefore understand each other. Small boys, on the other hand, do not understand girls, and therefore being looked after by one is a little like a hamster being looked after by a shark. If you are a small boy, it may be some consolation to you to know that even large boys do not understand girls, and girls, by and large, do not understand boys. This makes adult life very interesting.”

ChildrenHumorousBabysitter
Book:The Gates
Create image

“Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torch light beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.”

Books
Book:The Book of Lost Things
Create image

“These stories were very old, as old as people, and they had survived because they were very powerful indeed. They were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside. They were both an escape from reality and an alternative reality themselves. They were so old, and so strange, that they had found a kind of existence independent of the pages they occupied. The world of the old tales existed parallel to ours, but sometimes the walls separating the two became so thing and brittle that the two worlds started to blend into each other. That was when the trouble started. That was when the bad things came. That was when the Crooked Man began to appear to David.”

StoriesReadingBooks
Book:The Book of Lost Things
Create image