The Alienist

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

The fact that you cannot understand it does not mean that it doesn’t exist.

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.

every man’s actions are to a very decisive extent influenced by his early experiences, and that no man’s behavior can be analyzed or affected without knowledge of those experiences.

the relationship between book, readers, and author should always be clear, and always be pure:

They’re not really psychological investigations at all, but conventionally crafted whodunits, what I call narrative crossword puzzles.

“We revel in men like Beecham, Moore—they are the easy repositories of all that is dark in our very social world.

in many ways this man had faced greater odds throughout his nightmarish life, and—simply by surviving—had beaten them.

Then, too, the line on any race is not determined by the statistical record alone; it takes into account the intangibles of breeding and training as well.

in our dash to defeat evil, we had only given it a wider field in which to run its own wretched course.