Caleb Carr > Quotes

“It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”
― Caleb Carr

“The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“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. ”
― Caleb Carr

“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.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Change isn't something that most people enjoy, even if it's progressive change.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“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.”
― Caleb Carr

“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.”
― Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness

“It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves "New York Society.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“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.”
― Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness

“There's plenty of stories that need telling what never get told, just because people can't bear the listening.”
― Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness

“Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“... belief that the answers one gives to life's crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“They’ll want him to be mad, of course,’ Laszlo mused, not hearing me. ‘The doctors here, the newspapers, the judges; they’d like to think that only a madman would shoot a five-year-old girl in the head. It creates certain … difficulties, if we are forced to accept that our society can produce sane men who commit such acts.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“We are not obligated to provide everyone who comes to this country with a good life,” Morgan went on. “We are obligated to provide them with a chance to attain that life, through discipline and hard work. That chance is more than they have anywhere else. That is why they keep coming.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Both Kreizler and I had seen all this before, but familiarity did not breed acceptance.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others;
whatever seemed wrong to me,
others approved of.
I ran into feuds wherever I found myself,
I met disfavor wherever I went;
if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery;
so I had to be called “Woeful”:
Woe is all I possess.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Maybe memory was just a wicked curse, and the kind of mind what could wipe out painful recollections a blessing. Maybe .....”
― Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness

“Revenge is a kind of wild justice; and the more man turns to it, the more the law ought to weed it out.’ ” Nodding”
― Caleb Carr, Surrender, New York

“It is often difficult, I find, for people today to grasp the notion that one family, working through several restaurants could change the eating habit of an entire country. But such was the achievement of the Delmonicos in the United States of the last century. Before they opened their first small cafe on William Street in 1823, catering to the business and financial communities of Lower Manhattan, American food could generally be described as things boiled or fried whose purpose was to sustain hard work and hold down alcohol - usually bad alcohol. The Delmonicos, though Swiss, had brought the French method to America, and each generation of their family refined an expanded the experience ... The craving for first-rate dining became a kind of national fever in the latter decades of the century - and Delmonico's was responsible.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Still, it's an interesting technique--leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And *in* someone else.”
― Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness

“the defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people,”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
― Caleb Carr, Surrender, New York

“like the only hummable tune in a difficult opera.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“And so the new century will bring a new kind of law,' was how Mr. Picton summed things up.....
'Proceedings where victims and witnesses are put on trial instead of defendants, where a murderer in identified as 'a woman' instead of an individual....If things go on like this we'll find ourselves in some shadow world, where lawyers use the ignorance of the average citizen to manipulate justice the way priests did in the Middle ages.”
― Caleb Carr, The Angel of Darkness

“answers one gives to life’s crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“I believe half of a writer’s job is to, really, take you to another world and give you a view of things, information about another world that entertains you and informs you.”
― Caleb Carr

“I'd seen this happen several times before, in different institutions, but it was no less remarkable on each occasion: the words were like the flow of water over coals, taking away crackling heat and leaving only a steaming whisper, a perhaps momentary but nonetheless effective remission from deep-burning fire.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Kreizler emphasized that no good would come of conceiving of this person as a monster, because he was most assuredly a man (or a woman); and that man or woman had once been a child. First and foremost, we must get to know that child, and to know his parents, his siblings, his complete world. It was pointless to talk about evil and barbarity and madness; none of these concepts would lead us any closer to him. But if we could capture the human child in our imaginations – then we could capture the man in fact.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist