A condensed Shakespeare with all the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.

— John Connolly

A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer

— John Connolly

After all, evil was a kind of poison, an infection of the soul.

— John Connolly

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

— John Connolly

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.

— John Connolly

And Hurd, who had never had a mother and father, and who had never loved or been loved, marvelled at the ways in which feeling so wonderful could also leave one open to so much pain. In a strange way, he envied Samuel even that. He wanted to care about someone so much that it could hurt.

— John Connolly

And, in the darkness, David closed his eyes as all that was lost was found again.

— John Connolly

And I told him that I believed in God because I had seen His opposite. I had seen all that He was not, and been touched by it, and so I could no more deny the possibility of an ultimate goodness to set against such depravity than I could deny that daylight followed darkness, and night the day.

— John Connolly

And the Crooked Man heard her dreams, because that was where he wandered. His place was the land of the imagination, the world where stories began. The stories were always looking for a way to be told, to be brought to life through books and reading. That was how they crossed over from their world into ours. But with them came the Crooked Man, prowling between his world and ours, looking for stories of his own to create, hunting for children who dreamed bad dreams, who were jealous and angry and proud. And he made kings and queens of them, cursing them with a kind of power, even if the real power always lay in his hands. And in return they betrayed the objects of their jealousy to him, and he took them into his lair deep beneath the castle...

— John Connolly

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.

— John Connolly