Connor > Connor's Quotes

“Life is monstrous, but life is beautiful”
― Cody McFadyen

“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.”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“You had evil inside you, and you indulged it. Men will always indulge it.”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“There is a dark resource within all of us, a reservoir of hurt and pain and anger upon which we can draw when the need arises. Most of us rarely, if ever, have to delve too deeply into it. That is as it should be, because dipping into it costs and you lose a little of yourself each time, a small part of all that is good and honorable and decent about you. Each time you use it you have to go a little deeper, a little further down into the blackness. Strange creatures move through its depths, illuminated by a burning light from within and fueled only by the desire to survive and to kill. The danger in diving into that pool, in drinking from that dark water, is that one day you may submerge yourself so deeply that you can never find the surface again. Give in to it and you're lost forever.”
― John Connolly, The Killing Kind

“I thought it was her wicked stepmother who poisoned her...'
'...Turned out the wicked stepmother had an alibi.'
'...Seems she was off poisoning someone else at the time. Chance in a million, really. It was just bad luck.”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“We are not meant to know the time or the nature of our deaths (for all of us secretly hope that we may be immortal).”
― John Connolly, The Book of Lost Things

“When the Fox hears the Rabbit scream he comes a-runnin', but not to help.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Nothing made me happen. I happened.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“We can only learn so much and live.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal

“Being smart spoils a lot of things, doesn't it?”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Over this odd world, this half the world that's dark now, I have to hunt a thing that lives on tears.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.”
― Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising

“Humanity is not perfect in any fashion; no more in the case of evil than in that of good. The criminal has his virtues, just as the honest man has his weaknesses.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“How characteristic of your perverse heart that longs only for what happens to be out of reach.”
― Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“You may conquer her love of God: you will never overcome her fear of the devil.”
― Pierre A.F. Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses

“Marquise de Merteuil: I've distilled every thing to one single principle: win or die.”
― Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

“Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!”
― Bram Stoker

“Denn die Todten reiten Schnell. (For the dead travel fast.)”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me, with a red light of triumph in his eyes, and with a smile that Judas in hell might be proud of.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“The blood is life... and it shall be mine!”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“The world seems full of good men, even if there are monsters in it.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“You think to baffle me, you with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher's. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things. Nay, from what you have told me of your experiences already, you know something of what strange things there may be.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
― Mary Shelley

“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.”
― Mary Shelley

“I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel...”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You can never be overdressed or overeducated.”
― Oscar Wilde

“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray