The Instruments of Darkness Quotes

“When you lived alone, you got used to the sound of your own voice: at least it was a conversation with someone who understood you.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“You didn’t have to look very hard to be disappointed by human beings. We were not all bad, just enough of us, although the rest had to work very hard to make up for that minority.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“with a different head, she might have been enticing.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“Grief calls to grief, pain will find its echo, and sorrow, for all its idioms, is a universal language.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“He and his kind would never utterly disappear, with an influence disproportionate to their numbers—because such was the way with loud, prejudiced men—but they would always be outnumbered by the rest, and fundamental decency had a habit of prevailing. Ultimately Bobby, like all his species, was a frightened creature: fearful of change; fearful of anyone whose color, creed, or language was different from his own; and most of all, fearful of those who refused to follow his path.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“A number of the men and women sported tattoos, among them the twin lightning bolts of the Schutzstaffel, along with the good old swastika, beloved of inbreds, peckerwoods, and general shitheads everywhere, as well as an Iron Cross or two.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“ghosts may not be real, but no one has told the ghosts.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“testify, I knew”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“I took a last look at the miserable property, with its faded lettering and grim facade. It was a suitable outpost for the malignancy that Bobby Ocean represented, but he was the voice of the minority, whatever he might have believed to the contrary. The world was filled with better people than that. He and his kind would never utterly disappear, with an influence disproportionate to their numbers—because such was the way with loud, prejudiced men—but they would always be outnumbered by the rest, and fundamental decency had a habit of prevailing. Ultimately Bobby, like all his species, was a frightened creature: fearful of change; fearful of anyone whose color, creed, or language was different from his own; and most of all, fearful of those who refused to follow his path. Bobby Ocean was destined to die scared. But then, so were most of us.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“The impossible shies away from scrutiny and the numinous resists definition.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“had been alive long enough—to know that the last thing you wanted to happen was generally the first thing that did.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“The two men passed through an uncluttered living room on the way to the kitchen, although the former was as crepuscular as the latter.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“Objectively, Nowak wasn’t a bad guy, but he was a politician, which made him intrinsically untrustworthy. All politicians are ambitious, and ambition is a hunger that’s never sated. It’s a cousin to desire, even addiction. We’re all prey to the former, whatever the variant, and whether it becomes a vice or virtue depends on one’s principles. But politics, by its nature, requires compromise, and compromise and principles are like matter and anti-matter. In the end, every politician fails someone, but the last person he wants to fail is himself.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“I was halfway through a review of a contemporary art exhibition—trying to learn a new and difficult language was supposed to stave off dementia”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“but not even Tony and Paulie were sufficiently nostalgic for mayhem to darken the door of the Capital. Its interior smelled of dust, urine, and drain cleaner, the floor was permanently littered with fragments of shattered glass and broken dreams, and even the furniture had tattoos.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“At worst, a couple of people still owed him, and he’d find a way to pass the debt to them. This was one of the reasons Reggio had abjured criminality: it was so damn hard to keep track of one’s obligations, and the debit and credit columns never balanced the way they should.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“he wasn’t utterly devoid of emotion—but he’d grown up poor and had no illusions about it.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“It’s about time I started looking for a new challenge.” It struck me then how young she was: late twenties, at most. She was of a different generation. My father had drummed into me the importance of finding a job for life, one with a strong union behind it, good healthcare and benefits, and from which you couldn’t easily be dismissed, short of setting fire to your place of employment and giggling while it burned. That hadn’t really worked out for me, but I doubt it had ever even crossed Delaney Duhamel’s mind.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“You know, if COVID had given people warts or facial blisters, every fucking person in this state would have been fighting for a jab and a hazmat suit.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“Like the rest of the judicial system, it was a lottery, and like all lotteries, it was loaded in favor of the house.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“the Maine woods, unseen by man, a fly crawled across the basement floor of the house built from Kit No. 174. The surface was dirt, lately disturbed, and the fly could sense that there was something hidden in the cool dark, something worth finding. The insect began to burrow, pushing aside loose soil, the taste organs on its tarsi growing increasingly stimulated. After a few seconds of activity, it paused as though alert to a new threat. Its body jerked, the shock sending it onto its back. It waved its legs in the air and tried to right itself, but the fight was over before it had begun. The legs curled in on the abdomen, and all movement ceased. Whatever dwelt in Kit No. 174, whatever moved through its confines and stalked the surrounding forest, did not like to share its food.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“The house was to have been hers and was left empty after she passed, bearing faint traces of intentions never to be fulfilled, like fingerprints on a glass of untasted wine. For a house cursed by ill luck to remain unlived in is not unknown,”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“The morning mist had matured to drizzle as we stepped outside. The lowering sky was the color of factory smoke, distant birds like charred fragments ascending.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness

“The lowering sky was the color of factory smoke, distant birds like charred fragments ascending.”
― John Connolly, The Instruments of Darkness