Carl Kolchak quotes from Kolchak: The Night Stalker

Carl Kolchak

They say that the mystics of India, while in a trance, can grow back severed fingers and move boulders with the power of their minds. It's documented. Somehow, Paul Langlois - in his special dream state - did even more than that: He created a palpable horror.

Carl Kolchak

As the great Louis Pasteur once said, "Any schmoe can invent a rabies vaccine - but when will we find a cure for stupidity?"

Carl Kolchak

[narrating] They were loading unmarked boxes from an unmarked truck - but for me, everything had "double cross" written all over it.

Carl Kolchak

That's a vertebrae - what's that doing here?

Carl Kolchak

[opening narration] There are sections of Chicago the guidebooks don't refer to. You can't blame them, really. The guidebooks' function is to sell the glamor and excitement of our Windy City - and whichever way you dress it up, old age is neither glamorous, nor exciting. Roosevelt Heights used to be a plush neighborhood, but the plush neighbors moved uptown, leaving the old people - and old people don't move easily; they become set in their surroundings. Their friends live next door, they've been going to the same store for twenty-five years, and probably the most important of all - they can't afford to relocate, even if they wanted to. The battle of fixed income versus galloping inflation never ends, but even inflation took a backseat here in Roosevelt Heights, as a far greater fear overtook the residents... a terror which effectively dwarfed everything else.

Carl Kolchak

[closing narration] And if you happen to be walking along a lonely country road one night, and you see your favorite aunt coming toward you... good luck to you, too.

Carl Kolchak

[Voiceover of a groggy Kolchak, who has been doped by the Feds] I don't know when I was in this office last. In some ways it feels like I never left. [pause] No, that's not right. For a while I was away, far away, in the hands of men with no faces. They broke me down, broke my story down, and convinced me it hadn't happened the way I remembered. [Gropes for his tape recorder] Memories fade fast enough without chemical help. But if I don't tell this story now, I'm afraid I never will. Now... what was that date?

Carl Kolchak

Tell me, do mortuaries give you a weird feeling?

Carl Kolchak

Tony, how many times have you heard that by 1984 the computer will be running us?

Carl Kolchak

[dictating into his tape recorder] I don't even know where they took me, now. At least I can't be sure. Maybe it was Tyrell Institute, but it could have just as well been the Black Hills of South Dakota for all I know. Was there a drug? Pentothal? Scopolamine? I can't be sure of that either, but there must have been something. I can't even be sure the events even happened the way I have told them. Perhaps when I am completely back in this world, I'll turn on this tape and not believe any of it myself, but I doubt it. Because I believe that somewhere, some place, they, or someone else, will put some other R.I.N.G. together without the help of Leslie Dwyer. And who... who will program him, then? [He turns off the tape recorder]

Carl Kolchak

During World War Two, close to this very spot, science bore a child that changed the course of human relations and, to this day, threatens to end human history. It was called, innocuously enough, The Manhattan Project, and it grew into the terror we all have come to know as the hydrogen bomb. But this year, only a stone's throw from here, science delivered a new child.

Carl Kolchak

Dying and maiming were coming into vogue in the fashion business.

Carl Kolchak

[voiceover] The teenage years - sixteen candles, fervent passions, aimless joyrides, and the forbidden taste of beer - a time the world allows for sowing one's wild oats; but, for some individuals I came to know in the summer of their discontent, it had been a time when they had sown the seeds of their own destruction.

Carl Kolchak

There's an old simple axiom about the dead: Don't disturb them, not for any reason at all. Well, I decided to ignore that, and, so, I was almost beheaded by a phantom sword.

Carl Kolchak

[a car is driving down a country road at night. Kolchack speaks in a voiceover] It was Goethe who said we love girls for what they are. Even the great Goethe could have learned something from the tale that took place on the campus of Illinois State Tech. [the car stops in front of a woman] May 10th, 11:02. Don Rhiner, the school's star running back and candidate for All-American was out for a drive. [the woman gets into the car] Don never did make All-American.