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Kindle Notes & Highlights
survival was the goal of man’s mental as much as his physical development,
“It’s no great job to elude that which is not pursuing,”
Kreizler’s 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.
To the old guard of New York society, the Metropolitan Opera was “that yellow brewery uptown.”
the Metropolitan, which opened in 1883, had been paid for by seventy-five of New York’s most famous (and infamous) nouveaux riches: men with names like Morgan, Gould, Whitney, and Vanderbilt, none of whom were deemed by the old Knickerbocker clans to be socially acceptable enough to warrant selling them boxes at the venerable Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street.
rooftops in the New York of 1896 were secondary but nonetheless well-worn routes of urban travel, lofty counterparts to the sidewalks below that were full of their own distinctive types of traffic. Particularly in the tenement slums,
Of course, the defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people,
our minds work on the basis of self-interest, the survival of the organism, and our habitual ways of pursuing that interest become defined when we’re children and adolescents.”
wave after wave of Irish, Italian, and other Catholic immigrants, whose numbers were rapidly swelling the power of a religion which, in the first days of the republic, had been frowned on by nearly all the populace.
dealing with a man who’d personally beaten dozens of suspected and de facto criminals senseless, a style of interrogation that had become known throughout New York and the rest of the country by the name Byrnes himself had given it: “the third degree.”
a sadistic personality, one whose every action betrayed an obsessive desire to change his role in life from that of the victim to that of the tormentor.
My head felt like a solid block of Pittsburgh steel,
Prior to the twentieth century, persons suffering from mental illness were thought to be “alienated,” not only from the rest of society but from their own true natures.
