Kindle Notes & Highlights
Verdict equals law equals fact, and guilt becomes absolute guilt. Suddenly,
Crime news . . . lacks complexity’ according to Te Ara. In fact, it deals with the most complex subject in life.
A life reduced to statistics, the image of flesh on a slab: slowly, profoundly, we were being told what it’s like to be dead.
Lundy said to me, half in wonder, ‘I’ve talked to two other journalists, Mike White and Jared Savage. They didn’t make me cry. You do.’ The other half felt like rage.
It’s rare that we remember the names of victims. It’s as though our sympathies can’t match the depth of the loathing we reserve for a criminal élite whose names we never forget.
resistance to mend his foreign ways, failure to observe and share in the New Zealand way of life.
The sentence was brutish, ugly and long, and that’s the way it goes. All trials are horrible from beginning to end,
The apples had looked so fresh and delicious. Their absence took away the only goodness to be seen.
He sometimes took sleeping pills to knock himself out, and also to avoid waking up at whatever dark o’clock of the soul where he would inevitably replay the two or three minutes — a second would have made all the difference, even a quarter of a second — when his whole life changed and collapsed.
He had no use for civilisation. He was an outsider, a stately ruin. He was Kurtz who had travelled too far into a heart of darkness.
The journalism I love the most reads like sentences spoken in a dream — strange images, disconnected thoughts, random happenings and weird occurrences which may or may not be packed with hidden meaning.
Crime often reads like a map of the human heart. It’s a scarred landscape, a smoking ruin.
One of the great appeals of practising journalism is that you’re constantly writing sentences no one has ever written before.
Fantastic that the infinite variety of human experience, which journalism reports, should form sentences that no one had ever thought of writing before.
Bores of all ages say to journalists, ‘Don’t let the facts spoil a good story.’ It’s a nonsense, because a good story demands the facts; the accumulation of facts is the story.
Maynard’s book was called Where’s Peter? It begged for a subtitle. Something along the lines of Oh For Christ’s Sake He’s Most Likely Fucking Dead is Where.
because they were having a delayed New Year’s Eve celebration. It’s too hot in summer to throw a party, so locals wait seven months for the desert to cool.
Find! Falconio is described as an ‘exposition of Australia’s strangest disappearance (murder or missing?) and of the associated misinvestigations, cover-ups, and incompetence. Reveals the show trial in which the jury was lied to. Encourages readers to get involved in finding the British visitor (and drug courier?) Peter Falconio — dead or alive.’
