John Connolly

“After all, no relationship could function or survive under the burden of total honesty.”

“These were the tales that echoed in the head long after the books that contained them were cast aside.”

“You cannot perform acts of evil in the name of a greater good, because the good suffers. It is corrupted by what has been done in its name.”

“There is sometimes a feeling in crime fiction that good writing gets in the way of story. I have never felt that way. All you have is language. Why write beneath yourself? It's an act of respect for the reader as much as yourself.”

“You have to understand that only the very worst end up here: the ones whose anger made them kill, and who felt no sorrow or guilt after the act; those so obsessed with themselves that they turned their backs on the sufferings of others, and left them in pain; those whose greed meant that others starved and died. Such souls belong here, because they would find no peace elsewhere. In this place, they are understood. In this place, their faults have meaning. In this place, they belong.”

“It has always seemed to me that there are two types of people in this world: those rendered impotent by the sheer weight of evil it contains, and who refuse to act because they see no point, and those who choose their battles and fight them to the end, as they understand that to do nothing is definitely worse than to do something and fail. --The Collector”

“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.”

“My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's.”

“Unless you know the code, it has no meaning.”

“As for dying, he didn't believe that he was frightened of it: the manner of it, perhaps, but not the fact of it. After all, he had reached an age where dying had started to become an objective reality instead of an abstract concept.”

“Wickedness never rests easily so, in a way, one might almost feel pity for the wicked, for they are destined to live their lives in fear, in a prison of the heart.”

“Writers are magpies by nature, always collecting shiny things, storing them away and looking for connections of things.”

“After all this time, he had hope, and then hope was gone, and he hates himself for giving in to hope. He, who exists only to kill the hopes of others, could not destroy the hope within himself.”

“Real life was curious enough without the embellishments of fiction.”

“There are some truths so terrible that they should not be spoken aloud, so appalling that even to acknowledge them is to risk sacrificing a crucial part of one's humanity, to exist in a colder, crueler world than before.”

“Anyone who wants bookstores to survive is portrayed as a Luddite who goes around smashing up Kindles.”

“When did you get so clever?""When I realized I wasn't as clever as I thought.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”