Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.

— John Connolly

Before she came ill, David's mother would often tell him that stories were alive. They weren't alive in the way that people were alive, or even dogs or cats. (...) Stories were different, though: they came alive in the telling. Without a human voice to read them aloud, or a pair of wide eyes following them by torchlight beneath a blanket, they had no real existence in our world. (...) They lay dormant, hoping for the chance to emerge. Once someone started to read them, they could begin to change. They could take root in the imagination and transform the reader. Stories wanted to be read, David's mother would whisper. They needed it. It was the reason they forced themselves from their world into ours. They wanted us to give them life.

— John Connolly

Being shot at for years by men of a particular nationality will tend to impact negatively upon one’s view of them.

— John Connolly

But don't they say that all is fair in love and war? I heard that somewhere.""' They?' Who are 'they?'"" I don't know. Just people."" That's what the victorious claim, not the defeated; the powerful, not the powerless. 'All is fair.' 'The end justifies the means.' Is that what you believe?

— John Connolly

But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.

— John Connolly

David could tell, by looking at her face as she read, whether the story contained in the book was living inside her, and she in it, and he would recall again all that she had told him about stories and tales and the power that they wield over us, and that we in turn wield over them.

— John Connolly

Dogs were generally incompatible with melancholy.

— John Connolly

Evil, unlike good, is constantly at war with those most like itself, and ambition is its spur.

— John Connolly

For in every adult there dwells the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be.

— John Connolly

He became merely the broken statue of a beast, now without another's fear to animate it.

— John Connolly