Best 23 quotes of Caleb Carr on MyQuotes

Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.

Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.

I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.

I have to be very careful, however, because I have no intention of providing an excuse for this behavior. It's an attempt to explain how so many women come from backgrounds where the pressure to be a good mother is so severe that if they can't do it, something really snaps.

I, like most of my friends, couldn't believe I bought a mountain called Misery Mountain, because it was so appropriate.

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face

I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

People are disturbed enough by serial killers, but the whole notion of female violence, particularly maternal violence - the idea of mothers who kill - really unnerves people.

People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety

Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.

She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren't the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.

So if it seems that some of what I'll have to say in the pages to come doesn't reflect the mellowing of age, that's only because I've never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.

Still, it's an interesting technique-leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.

The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.

The definition of terrorism is killing civilians with the intent of changing their political affiliation.

Warfare against civilians must never be answered in kind. Terror must never be answered with terror.

You want to believe that there's one relationship in life that's beyond betrayal. A relationship that's beyond that kind of hurt. And there isn't.

If you're gonna catch criminals, you got to be a bit of one yourself.

It isn’t really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn’t want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society—more important, even, than honest or decent—is identifiable. Even when Libby’s evil—perhaps most of all when she’s evil—she’s easy to categorize, to stick to a board with a pin like some scientific specimen. Those men in Stillwater are terrified of her because being terrified lets them know who she is—it keeps them safe. Imagine how much harder it would be to say, yes, she’s a woman capable of terrible anger and violence, but she’s also someone who’s tried desperately to be a nurturer, to be a good and constructive human being. If you accept all that, if you allow that inside she’s not just one or the other, but both, what does that say about all the other women in town? How will you ever be able to tell what’s actually going on in their hearts—and heads? Life in the simple village would suddenly become immensely complicated. And so, to keep that from happening, they separate things. The normal, ordinary woman is defined as nurturing and loving, docile and compliant. Any female who defies that categorization must be so completely evil that she’s got to be feared, feared even more than the average criminal—she’s got to be invested with the powers of the Devil himself. A witch, they probably would have called her in the old days. Because she’s not just breaking the law, she’s defying the order of things.

It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.