You have to stop worrying about looking foolish, 'cause fear of being humiliated really limits you.

It's only life. We all get through it.

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work--it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him. Or her.

What is is. It doesn't matter why.

The true nature of the world was weirder than any bizarre fabric that anyone might weave from the warp and weft of imagination's loom.

Bad men trust no one because they know the treachery of which they themselves are capable.

If allowed to be, the heart is self-policing, and a reasonable measure of guilt guards against corruption.

No one can genuinely love the world, which is too large to love entire. To love all the world at once is pretense or dangerous self-delusion. Loving the world is like loving the idea of love, which is perilous because, feeling virtuous about this grand affection, you are freed from the struggles and the duties that come with loving people as individuals.

Chaos half-loosed cannot be long controlled; it is all or nothing.

Ambition and stupidity are a dangerous combination.

Acting is a marvelous profession ... If you can spend enough time playing other people, you don't have to think too much about your own character and motivations.

From the day we're born ... we should all be afraid, but not of dying.

Between birth and burial, we find ourselves in a comedy of mysteries. If you don't think life is mysterious, if you believe you have it all mapped out, you aren't paying attention or you've anesthetized yourself with booze or drugs, or with a comforting ideology. And if you don't think life's a comedy--well, friend, you might as well hurry along to that burial. The rest of us need people with whom we can laugh.

Loss is the hardest thing ... but it's also the teacher that's the most difficult to ignore.

Anger is a violent emotion, vindictive, and as dangerous to he who is driven by it as to anyone on whom it is turned.

What does worry accomplish except to breed more worry?

We make so many of our own troubles, from mere mishaps to disasters, by dwelling on the possibility of them until the possible becomes inevitable.

Desperation is energized despair.

Bad men wound and destroy one another, although as targets they prefer those who are innocent and as pure as this world allows anyone to be. They feed on violence, but they feast on the despoiling of what is good.

It was a lust for power of one kind or another that quivered at the root of every base human desire.

The past is as locked in stone as a Jurassic fossil, but by our daily actions, we continuously change the future.

Every talent is unearned ... and with it comes a solemn obligation to use it as fully and as wisely as possible.

You can't stand an idea up against a wall and execute it. Neither can you wrap it up in a tissue of your better judgment and tuck it in a box of forgetfulness. An idea can be the most dangerous of all things, especially if it is an idea that promises you the most particular and exquisite happiness for which you've long yearned.

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility. Each of us is a potential source of foolishness, each of us must endure the consequences of the foolishness of others, and in addition to all that, Nature frequently works to impress upon us our absurdity and thereby remind us that we are not the masters of the universe that we like to suppose we are.

By doing, I learn what to do. By going, I learn where to go. One day, by dying, I'll learn how to die.

Appearances are not reality; but they often can be a convincing alternative to it. You can control appearances most of the time, but facts are what they are. When the facts are too sharp, you can craft a cheerful version of the situation and cover the facts the way that you can covered a battered old four-slice toaster with a knitted cozy featuring images of kittens.

There's just something unsettling about studying your reflection. It's not a matter of being dissatisfied with your face or of being embarrassed by your vanity. Maybe it's that when you gaze into your own eyes, you don't see what you wish to see--or glimpse something that you wish weren't there.

DEAN KOONTZ, Deeply Odd

We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.

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