John Connolly

After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul.

The biggest life change any man would ever experience was the ending of it.

I dream dark dreams. I dream of a figure moving through the forest, of children flying from his path, of young women crying at his coming. I dream of snow and ice, of bare branches and moon-cast shadows. I dream of dancers floating in the air, stepping lightly even in death, and my own pain is but a faint echo of their suffering as I run. My blood is black on the snow, and the edges of the world are silvered with moonlight. I run into the darkness, and he is waiting. I dream in black and white, and I dream of him. I dream of Caleb, who does not exist, and I am afraid.

He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another's fear to animate it.

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.

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.

I think the act of reading imbues the reader with a sensitivity toward the outside world that people who don't read can sometimes lack. I know it seems like a contradiction in terms; after all reading is such a solitary, internalizing act that it appears to represent a disengagement from day-to-day life. But reading, and particularly the reading of fiction, encourages us to view the world in new and challenging ways...It allows us to inhabit the consciousness of another which is a precursor to empathy, and empathy is, for me, one of the marks of a decent human being.

I feel that I'll be buried in Ireland and don't think I'll ever live in the U.S. I'm not comfortable with many aspects of U.S. society - especially the justice system.

I believe in those whom I love and trust. All else is foolishness. This god is as empty as his church. His followers choose to attribute all of their good fortune to him, but when he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he ignores their pleas or leaves them to suffer, they say only that he is beyond their understanding and abandon themselves to his will. What kind of god is that?

The only person who needs to know about failure is yourself.

Misery loved company, but damnation needed it.

I used to think this was all about good and evil,_ said Rickett, __ut it__ not.___o?___here__ a kind of evil that isn__ even in opposition to good, because good is an irrelevance to it. It__ a foulness that__ right at the heart of existence, born with the stuff of the universe. It__ in the decay to which all things tend. It is, and it always will be, but in dying we leave it behind.___nd while we__e alive?___e set our souls against it, and our saints and angels, too._ He patted Parker on the shoulder. __specially the destroying ones.

It__ a full-time job being homeless. It__ a full-time job being poor.

But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.

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?

A condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.

We all have our routines," he said softly."But they must have a purpose and provide an outcome that we can see and take some comfort from, or else they have no use at all. Without that, they are like the endless pacings of a caged animal. If they are not madness itself, then they are a prelude to it.

He had quite liked the dwarfs. He often had no idea what they were talking about, but for a group of homicidal, class-obsessed small people, they were really rather good fun.