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Michelle McNamara QUOTES

Michelle McNamara QUOTES

1 " I want to know more about true, complete people, not dirty scraps of humans. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

2 " He loses his power when we know his face. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

3 " One day soon, you’ll hear a car pull up to your curb, an engine cut out. You’ll hear footsteps coming up your front walk. Like they did for Edward Wayne Edwards, twenty-nine years after he killed Timothy Hack and Kelly Drew, in Sullivan, Wisconsin. Like they did for Kenneth Lee Hicks, thirty years after he killed Lori Billingsley, in Aloha, Oregon.

The doorbell rings.

No side gates are left open. You’re long past leaping over a fence. Take one of your hyper, gulping breaths. Clench your teeth. Inch timidly toward the insistent bell.

This is how it ends for you.

“You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark,” you threatened a victim once.

Open the door. Show us your face.

Walk into the light. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

4 " Kool and the Gang’s 'Celebration' wasn’t the soundtrack for my frame of mind. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

5 " Yet he was still out there blending in, a man whose ordinariness was his mask. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

6 " The victims recede from view. Their rhythm is off, their confidence drained. They’re laden with phobias and made tentative by memory. Divorce and drugs beset them. Statutes of limitations expire. Evidence kits are tossed for lack of room. What happened to them is buried, bright and unmoving, a coin at the bottom of a pool. They do their best to carry on. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

7 " A forensic match between the cases didn’t exist but a feeling did, a sense that a single mind was at work, someone who didn’t leave many clues or talk or show his face, someone who strolled undetected in the middle-class swarm, an ordinary man with a resting-pulse derangement. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

8 " I don’t care if I’m the one who captures him. I just want bracelets on his wrists and a cell door slamming behind him. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

9 " Looking back now, it feels like I was born into a party that had started to wind down. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

10 " I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy. So like any responsible consumer, I try to be careful in the choices I make. I read only the best: writers who are dogged, insightful, and humane. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

11 " It was a heady feeling, the idea that one could conjure a man from a stain on a calico patchwork quilt from 1978, that one could reverse the flow of power. If you commit murder and then vanish, what you leave behind isn’t just pain but absence, a supreme blankness that triumphs over everything else. The unidentified murderer is always twisting a doorknob behind a door that never opens. But his power evaporates the moment we know him. We learn his banal secrets. We watch as he’s led, shackled and sweaty, into a brightly lit courtroom as someone seated several feet higher peers down unsmiling, raps a gavel, and speaks, at long last, every syllable of his birth name. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

12 " That’s what we do. All of us. We make well-intentioned promises of protection we can’t always keep. I’ll look out for you. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

13 " I love my husband. I hate men. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

14 " I’m envious, for example, of people obsessed with the Civil War, which brims with details but is contained. In my case, the monsters recede but never vanish. They are long dead and being born as I write. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

15 " He's the fake shark in Jaws, barely seen so doubly feared. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

16 " Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

17 " My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

18 " What is the lasting damage when you believe the warm spot you were just sleeping in will be your grave? "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

19 " Why are you so interested in crime?” people ask me, and I always go back to that moment in the alley, the shards of a dead girl’s Walkman in my hands. I need to see his face. He loses his power when we know his face. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

20 " Most violent criminals smash through life like human sledgehammers. They have fists for hands and can’t plan beyond their sightlines. They’re caught easily. They talk too much. They return to the scene of the crime, as conspicuous as tin cans on a bumper. But every so often a blue moon surfaces. A snow leopard slinks by. "

― Michelle McNamara , I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer