Quotes from Dean Koontz in His Book: Relentless

This book was a mystery thriller, that bordered on unrealistic, but had some fantastic observations on who we are as human beings! I have included a few noteworthy quotations.

“I wanted my son to know much laughter and more love, to appreciate the grace of this world and the abiding mystery of it, to know the pleasure of small achievements, of trifles and of follies, to be always aware of the million wonderful little pictures in the big one, to be a humble master of his gift and the not the servant of it.”

“God has a sense of humor, and because the world is wondrous, He expects us to find reasons to smile, even on the darkest days.”

“truth is paradoxical, that it is always stranger than fiction. We invent fiction either to distract ourselves from the world – and thus from the truth of things – or to explain the world to ourselves, but we cannot invent truth, which simply is. Truth, when we recognize it, always surprises us, which is why we so seldom choose to recognize it; we abhor profound surprises and prefer what is familiar, comfortable and undemanding”

“the greatest punishment is not your own death but instead the loss of those you love. How much worse that loss must be if you have to live with the bitter knowledge that those you trusted and relied on you had been dealt early death as surrogates for you, punished for your offenses.”

“Always, the eye sees more than the mind can comprehend, and we go through life self-blinded to much that lies before us. We want a simple world, but we live in a magnificently complex one, and rather than open ourselves to it, we perceive the world through filters that make it less daunting.
Complexity implies meaning. We are afraid of meaning.”

“Each of us is the sum of his experiences, not in the Freudian sense that we are victims of them, but in the sense that we rely on our experiences as the primary source of our wisdom, unless we are delusional and live by an ideology that refutes reality. At decision points in life, a sane person is guided by the lessons of his past. Among other things, my past had taught me that the very fact of my existence is a cause for amazement and wonder, that we must seize life because we never know how much of it remains for us, that faith is the antidote to despair and that laughter is the music of faith.
But every lesson we learn from past experiences is not always the one we should have learned. One moment of my past had taught me that anger should always be watered down if not extinguished with humor, and I made no distinction between unworthy anger and the righteous kind. Anger is the father of violence, as well I know, but I had not allowed myself to consider that wrath, when it is the product of pure indignation and untainted by ideology, is the father of justice and a necessary answer to evil.”
“this humble interval not only amused me but also struck me as immeasurably precious, one of those prosaic moment from which so much delight can be taken that the world must have been created as a place of joy.”

“here is why Waxx and men like him must not be allowed to achieve their ends. The world wasn’t theirs. They could claim it only with the use of lies, intimidation, and violence. If we let them win, there would be no moments of grace, humble or glorious, ever again.”

“in the hearts of modern men and women, there is an inescapable awareness that something is wrong with this slice of history they have inherited, that in spite of the towering cities and the mighty armies and the science fiction technology made real, the moment is fragile, the foundation undermined.”

“In spite of where we were, how we had gotten here, and why we had come, I felt that at this moment of our lives, this place was exactly where we belonged. We were not drifting but rising, rising toward something right and of significance”