Extraordinary Quotations!!

All harvested from one book. So timely ... ALL of them!

So … all the quotations come from the 2023 novel The House at the End of the World, by Dean Koontz.

I’d never read any of his books before, since they are not really my usual genre.

I was actually drawn to the book because I had run across this quoted somewhere:

“When a majority of people in any society share the same array of delusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies go mad. History is filled with those examples.” – Dean Koontz, The House at the End of the World

& in the years since March 2020 (we all know what I’m talking about), mass delusion has kinda been a recurring theme … no?? That, & evil, of course.

So.

Anyway.

Interesting book!

Simply brimming with great quotations. See below. Took me ages to type them all up this morning – but I think it was time well spent. The quotes are too good not to share!

The Quotations

Again – all are from The House at the End of the World, by Dean Koontz.

<p. 57> To share the truth with him - with anyone - will invite pity she can't tolerate. Furthermore, she's sure that sharing her feelings will inevitably trivialize them. There is something sacred about great suffering, and it is the sacredness that makes the pain endurable. To speak of the past, to describe her ordeal, she has nothing but words, and words are insufficient to the task; mere words will reduce the sacred to tabloid-newspaper sensationalism. And then she'll have nothing.

<p. 60> Katie doesn't say that the FBI is spouting bullshit. Lindblom is obviously among those naive souls who believe what authorities tell them in the name of science. These days, "science" is often nothing more than a cover story. She doesn't ask him about drones. If they were aware of drones on the mainland, he would volunteer whatever lies the people on Ringrock concocted to explain them.

<p. 68> Katie slides forward in her chair. "Do you really believe the past is past? I think the past might be our future, that we've been laying the ground for new Dachaus, new Auschwitzes, all in the name of compassion, progress, justice, prosperity. Of the hard lessons that humanity learns, how many are retained? How very few? The passion of angry ideologues, the ignorance of the arrogant, the ferocity of utopians - how can such people lead the world to anything but its end?"

<p. 79> Returning from the grotto, north to south on Jacob's Ladder, Katie indulges in a slow burn that never escalates from mere vexation. Life has taught her that it's mentally exhausting and spiritually depressing to waste energy and time fanning the flames of anger when the reason for her outrage is someone who can't be affected by anything she does or some malignant force in society that, when challenged, will engulf her and dissolve her in a metastatic frenzy. Patience, steadiness, and hope are healthier than anger; therefore, in spite of evidence to the contrary, she still trusts that the world has been shapen to a purpose and that the purpose is not the triumph of evil.

<p. 135> Conversely, if she has learned one thing about herself that is the most discouraging, is that she is immune to the illusions in which so many people take comfort. Even though comfort based on an illusion is itself illusory, it is for a while a deliverance from the anxiety and existential dread that the world today can generate in abundance. She does not believe that any political ideology can shape society into a utopia. She knows that, instead, even the most earnest utopians always and everywhere create horrific dystopias. She does not believe that scientists are always honest, that rapidly advancing technology will inevitably save us, that everything that is called "progress" is in fact progress. She knows that "experts" are often frauds, that "intellectuals" can be as ignorant as anyone, and that those who most strenuously signal their virtue and are celebrated for it will always prove to be among the most corrupt. Such innate clearheadedness ensures that comforting illusions will elude her, though there are times, as now, that she might welcome the comfort of them.

When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples. Joe Smith knew it when he built this house.

<p. 225> Childless and widowed, to cope with her losses, she has sought - irrationally, she now realizes - to understand evil, even to concretize it in a visual metaphor within a painting that says to the mind and heart, This is why. Now she arrives at the realization that the why of evil is not to be found anywhere in the flaws of society or its institutions, nor can it be pinned down even by the most erudite and loquacious philosopher. The why of evil is in the human soul, which can't be examined with a CT scan or MRI to locate a dark mass, or dissected in an autopsy to learn in what artery the calcification proved mortal. Evil is a mystery for theologians, of which she is not one. Evil is irrational. There is no why formed so complete that it will satisfy her. Rather than spend her life in a fruitless effort to understand evil and those who commit it, she can do no more - and no less - than resist it.

<p. 235> Katie lowers the AR-15, not because she is confident that the girl is incapable of deceit, but because she cannot kill a child. If Libby is not what she seems, then Katie will be riddled with buckshot and follow her family to the grave. To die rather than kill a child is not a failure to keep the Promise, but an honoring of it. Those who murder children have killed their own souls an exist rather than live, and neither live nor exist in any world to come.

<p. 269> Here is the fruit of arrogance, fallen from the tree of hubris, as rotten as the minds of those who believe they can learn all that exists to be known and can control anything they wish to control, who believe that it is their right, above the rights of all other men and women, to shape the destinies of their neighbors, cities, nations, and the Earth entire, according to their whims.

<p. 290> Katie finishes by saying, "We can't give in to evil, to those who do such things, because what they want is us to go still and quiet and never speak back to them. These past two years, I've been trying to figure out how to speak back and haven't been doing a good job of it. My Avi used to say, 'Always keep moving. The Fates are master sharpshooters, and the easy target is the one who's standing still.' By 'keep moving,' he also meant keep telling the truth, keep doing what's right, keep believing what you do matters, because when you give up on the truth, you become one of them.

<p. 294> However, she's now been reminded of what she never should have forgotten - that the true prince of this world isn't Moloch. The prince of this world is the father of lies, and his followers are legion.

<p. 305> She is compelled to act not just because Zenon is a cop killer and might be the biological revolution that, for seven years, Moloch has schemed to dispatch into the world beyond Ringrock. These recent events have summoned her from a dream of permanent escape to the reality that in a well-lived life, there is never any escape from commitment, from responsibility not merely for family but also for others whom the violent would sweep away. She has been awakened as well to the realization that though perhaps half of humanity has no such sense of responsibility, their indifference is no justification for her to retreat into a life of self-interest.

<p. 354> Or maybe the people who should care about the consequences to public health don't care about anything other than concealing the truth and shifting the blame to nonexistent villains.

***************

Am I right??

Enjoy, and, I hope, be inspired by some of them.

Janet, in Toronto

p.s. I have a long history of collecting inspiring quotations. You can see some of them on my other site – both on the main page & in the Quotation Central section. Tons of them! In a whole slew of categories from A - Z (well, almost).