Going Home in the Dark Quotes

“Until this chapter, the story has been intended to be highly amusing—and is likewise structured for that purpose in what follows—but for this one interlude, deep melancholy could not be avoided. It just is what it is.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“However, the author and his editor and his publisher and the perpetually nervous folks in the marketing department are well aware that studies conducted by major universities (them again) indicate that between 39 and 57 percent of modern readers, who lead busy lives even if to no sensible point, have markedly less patience for character details than did readers in the time of Charles Dickens or, for that matter, in the time of Herman Wouk. Consequently, strategies have been developed to keep all readers, the patient and the impatient, engaged. One strategy is to divide long chapters into two shorter ones, wherever possible, to distract the reader from the amount of character detail and to contribute to the illusion of headlong suspense. That is why the material in this chapter was moved from Chapter Three, where it appeared in the first draft.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“I commend to you the quotation from the great novelist Thomas Hardy, which serves as the epigraph at the front of this volume and which, for your convenience, I repeat herewith: Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“have already given the institute a cure for the lethal toe fungus with which Beta afflicted them, but you never know what will come next.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Rebecca stepped closer to the horse and smoothed a hand along its magnificent neck. “Why is it that you speak of yourself as ‘I’ and ‘me,’ while Beta says ‘we’ and ‘us’?” “Beta is a fascist-communist fungus that favors collectivism. I am a fungus with a great respect for freedom. We will be contesting over Maple Grove for a long time—another reason you don’t want to be here. Beta will be destructive. Although I will do my best to be constructive, I will no doubt make mistakes. My brain does not weigh two and a half tons, as the institute estimates, but two and a third tons. We grow slowly. I am embarrassed to say it will be two hundred sixty years until my brain weighs two and a half tons. I believe I have thus far done the right thing by making this town crime-free, but because my brain is not yet as big as it should be, I suspect I have inspired too intense a feeling of community among the residents in the last block of Harriet Nelson Lane.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“To More Quickly Impart Vital and Fearsome Information In a novel of deep mystery and strangeness, informational conversations between the good guys and the bad guys nearly always come near the end of the story. They must be written in such a way that they don’t bring the narrative to a stop, have entertainment value of their own, and avoid just shoveling revelations at the reader. This is often achieved by disclosing surprising and yet logical new facets to the characters (as with Britta’s lustful nature), by maintaining an atmosphere of imminent violence, by dialogue that alarms or amuses, and by additional techniques that will not be revealed here, where no one is paying to learn them. However, there comes a point at which our desire to know how the hell it all ends becomes paramount. Who lives, who dies, and what kind of mess do they leave behind? This can be especially true when the author has used foreshadowing to warn that at least one of the good guys (Bobby) is very likely to perish. Consequently, a change in tactics of narration becomes essential. Remaining revelations must be made, but succinctly, dwelling less on atmosphere, trimming descriptions of characters’ actions, and thus thrusting us on toward the terror, violence, and destruction that we all enjoy so much. Let’s see if this works: To Rebecca, in the parlor of the rectory, Britta and Larry appeared arrogant and self-assured, as if this confrontation must be a matter of life and death and as if the amigos were already doomed. “Beta killed Aldous Blomhoff? What is Beta?”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“antimacassars”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“The poet Coleridge wrote, “Friendship is a sheltering tree,” and Charles Dickens wrote, “The wing of friendship never moults a feather,” and neither of those wise gentlemen was full of shit.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“They felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, when he stood at the foot of the starship ramp, gazing up into the bright mystery of that vessel, but they also felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws, when he was leaning over the stern of the fishing boat when a great white as big as a whale rose toward him out of the sea, while simultaneously they felt like Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl, when he realized that he loved Marsha Mason and her adorable little girl more than he loved the idea of being a star on Broadway. In these circumstances, remembering the first two films made sense, but why the third should come to mind was inexplicable, although in addition to being much beloved by general audiences of successive generations, Mr. Dreyfuss had always been a particular favorite of nerds.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Nerds were nerds because they were very intelligent, but we must also understand that, in spite of their intelligence, they were willing to believe in an array of the most fantastic things because they didn’t much believe in themselves. A void will always be filled.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Indeed, there wasn’t a nerd in the world who wouldn’t scheme to find a way to get past that barrier; more than mundane people, nerds were quick to imagine—and be overtaken by a fierce certainty—that beyond any forbidden door must be the bodies of extraterrestrials recovered from a crashed starship or the first android that could pass for human, or proof of Bigfoot’s existence, or a genetically engineered golden retriever possessing human-level intelligence, or compelling evidence that JFK had been assassinated by a robot terminator from the future and that the historic events in Dallas had been fabricated, or all of the above.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“They came out of Spencer’s house into a cold stillness through which the first snow of the season fell in skeins as plumb as rain falls on a windless day. Rebecca marveled at the ermine blanket that softened the hard edges of everything on a horizontal plane. Without wind to paste the flakes to the sides of things, nearly all vertical planes remained dark and dry, in stark contrast to the horizontal planes. When she brought this to the attention of the guys, Rebecca further remarked on the fact that tree bark and other rough vertical surfaces captured and held a small percentage of the snow directly proportional to the depth of the texture. Being nerds, they had all noticed this detail, but sharing it aloud filled them with a warm sense of camaraderie.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“comestibles”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“quotation from the great novelist Thomas Hardy, which serves as the epigraph at the front of this volume and which, for your convenience, I repeat herewith: Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“eidetic memory,”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“She supposed she had gotten stuck in adolescence because of the events erased from her memory, but she understood now that the negligence of her libidinous mother and her grandparents’ constant efforts to infantilize her had lasting consequences with which she must deal if she were to survive the current crisis.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“libidinous”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Butch was no one’s idea of what a ballet teacher or a flutist in an orchestra ought to look like. His arms were more powerful than those of a bear, though somewhat less hairy. His chest appeared so immense that he could have donated half of it for transplant to a weak-chested man and still been unable to find shirts to fit him. Because his neck was as wide as his shaved skull, his head resembled a mortar round welded to his shoulders. His broad face might have been pleasant if he hadn’t been scowling and if his scowl didn’t conjure in the mind images of medieval executioners in black leather pants and vests, wielding massive axes with razor-sharp blades.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Most people were of the opinion that pudding was one of the few things to enjoy about a stay in the hospital, but Spencer disliked pudding to such an extent that it might accurately be said that he despised it. He preferred thoracic surgery to pudding. The exception was crème brûlée. He loved crème brûlée. Of course, if you were in a fine French restaurant and referred to crème brûlée as “pudding,” you would deserve what you got if the chef showed up at tableside and beat you with a large spatula.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Twenty miles from Maple Grove, as he passed a wind farm of two-hundred-foot-tall towers, a great flock of birds winged with foolish confidence where their kind had flown for millennia. The massive whirling blades introduced the concept of mortality to their small brains, reducing 90 percent of them to a shower of feathers, blood, chopped flesh, and bone bits.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Often a ludicrous and impossible story premise that seemed as dead as a cluster of rotten tulip bulbs could suddenly put forth green shoots and then stems and then glorious flowers, becoming a shining novel of a hundred thousand or even two hundred thousand words.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“took only two steps into the room before an unusual smell halted him no less abruptly than if he had walked into a glass wall. Artists of many disciplines have a highly developed olfactory sense and respond dramatically even to subtle odors that most people cannot detect or of which they take only transitory notice. Writers and songwriters and musicians are among the gifted in this regard, actors and dancers and painters not so much, least of all film directors and mimes and those who make origami animals. By far the artists most sensitive to smells are sculptors; no one knows why, though this matter is the subject of hundreds of scientific studies conducted at prestigious universities.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“ocarina,”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“He worked exclusively in a fugue state, though not by choice. [For those readers who have never heard of a fugue state in the dull kind of fiction they usually read, please allow me to explain. During such a condition, individuals appear to be like you or me, engaged in ordinary tasks, when in fact they are not consciously aware of what they are doing. Upon recovery from this phase, they have no memory of where they have been or what they have done. This might seem to be a convenient excuse for all kinds of outrageous behavior, but in fact it is a condition extensively documented by psychologists and other experts of their ilk. This is not the ideal place to explain how Spencer fell into such a curious career; that moment will come in Chapter Six, after he is on the road to Maple Grove and the momentum of the story is sweeping us right along. However, I felt that I could not just slap you with the term fugue state and then merely breeze onward without an explanation.]”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“guano”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“If there were words to express my intentions, I wouldn’t have expressed them in images.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“At the age of ninety-four, she perished in her sleep from what Dr. Sweeny Feld called “spontaneous mummification,” though the physician was known to imbibe to excess at times and to have a macabre sense of humor.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“Although it is standard practice in these violent times for authors to kill major characters early in—as well as all the way through—a novel, merely for the shock value, this is not that kind of story, nor is the storyteller in this case cavalier about the value of human life. Of course, the storyteller reserves the right to kill off characters much later in the book, if the logic of the plot and the emotional payoff for readers justify it, or if the storyteller finds one or more characters annoying.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“I find it hard to believe that you, the author of The Blind Man’s Lantern, can’t imagine an explanation better than souvenir underpants.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark

“His first impulse was to turn the car around, head back to the airport in Indianapolis, fly to California, take a flight from there to Tokyo, and then decide on a destination that was comfortably far away from Maple Grove.”
― Dean Koontz, Going Home in the Dark