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Babe, the family favorite—an old fat workhorse who never objected to lumbering about with three and four children astride her broad back. Mr. Clutter now fed Babe the core of his apple, calling good morning to a man raking debris inside the corral—
He is singlehandedly making me wan to stop writing such long sentences after all these years... Wtf is blud doing
raise Cain,
-Chapel Hill circa 2021
THE YOUNG man breakfasting in a café called the Little Jewel never drank coffee. He preferred root beer.
Me af.....
Far from it; his own face enthralled him. Each angle of it induced a different impression. It was a changeling’s face, and mirror-guided experiments had taught him how to ring the changes, how to look now ominous, now impish, now soulful; a tilt of the head, a twist of the lips, and the corrupt gypsy became the gentle romantic.
Lilliputian gewgaws—
(derogatory)
It was as though by keeping this room impersonal, by not importing her intimate belongings but leaving them mingled with those of her husband, she lessened the offense of not sharing his quarters.
“You’ll catch cold,” Mr. Helm said. Nancy laughed; she had never been ill—not once.
how.
The mood of a man insuring his life is not unlike that of a man signing his will; thoughts of mortality must occur.
He shook three aspirins out of a bottle, chewed them slowly (for he liked the taste), and then drank water from the basin tap.
Psycho behavior
Several murderers, or men who boasted of murder or their willingness to commit it, circulated inside Lansing; but Dick became convinced that Perry was that rarity, “a natural killer”—absolutely sane, but conscienceless, and capable of dealing, with or without motive, the coldest-blooded deathblows. It was Dick’s theory that such a gift could, under his supervision, be profitably exploited.
But as in every manifestation, she continued to tinker with her handwriting, slanting it to the right or to the left, shaping it roundly or steeply, loosely or stingily—as though she were asking, “Is this Nancy? Or that? Or that? Which is me?”
Me
(Once Mrs. Riggs, her English teacher, had returned a theme with a scribbled comment: “Good. But why written in three styles of script?” To which Nancy had replied: “Because I’m not grown-up enough to be one person with one kind of signature.”)
The people of Holcomb speak of their post office as “the Federal Building,” which seems rather too substantial a title to confer on a drafty and dusty shed.
A sensible question, as Mrs. Clare, an admirer of logic, though a curious interpreter of it, was driven to admit.
He wished “folks would stop yappin’
Yeah
Dewey, for example, found it difficult to understand “how two individuals could reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it took to commit such a crime.”
Church, who is sixty or so, pink-skinned and professorial-looking, but “tough,” according to his colleagues, and “the fastest draw in Kansas,” is called Curly, because his head is partly hairless.)
😭😭😭😭
“This old girl, she’s sleeping good as ever. Anybody wants to play a trick on me, let ’em try.” (Eleven months later a gun-toting team of masked bandits took her at her word by invading the post office and relieving the lady of nine hundred and fifty dollars.)
a gallon jug of root-beer syrup (he feared that his favorite beverage might not be available in Mexico),
“Funny, but you know, Bess, I’ll bet he wasn’t afraid. I mean, however it happened, I’ll bet right up to the last he didn’t believe it would. Because it couldn’t. Not to him.”
The basis of his fear, or so he himself seemed to believe, was a newly grown superstitious certainty that “whatever had to happen won’t happen” as long as he and Dick “stick together.”
Ocd king
(Sample page: “Thanatoid = deathlike; Omnilingual = versed in languages; Amerce = punishment, amount fixed by court; Nescient = ignorance; Facinorous = atrociously wicked; Hagiophobia = a morbid fear of holy places & things; Lapidicolous = living under stones, as certain blind beetles; Dyspathy = lack of sympathy, fellow feeling; Psilopher = a fellow who fain would pass as a philosopher; Omophagia = eating raw flesh, the rite of some savage tribes; Depredate = to pillage, rob, and prey upon; Aphrodisiac = a drug or the like which excites sexual desire; Megalodactylous = having abnormally large
...more
hullabaloo,
feeling kind of footy.
Futt
In any event, Mr. Bell, entirely unaware of his guests’ intentions, which included throttling him with a belt and leaving him, robbed of his car, his money, and his life, concealed in a prairie grave, was glad to have company, somebody to talk to and keep him awake until he arrived at Omaha.
She was seventy-four years old, but in Nye’s opinion, “looked younger—maybe ten minutes younger.”
Alone: in Mrs. Johnson’s opinion, that was how such men should live. Wives, children, a timid life are not for them.
buggy, pal.”
his sexual history (“I’ve always behaved like a one-hundred-percent normal”);
But Mr. Clutter says, ‘What safe?’ He says he don’t have any safe. I knew right then it was true. He had that kind of face. You just knew whatever he told you was pretty much the truth.
Duntz asks Smith, “Added up, how much money did you get from the Clutters?” “Between forty and fifty dollars.”
But when the crowd caught sight of the murderers, with their escort of blue-coated highway patrolmen, it fell silent, as though amazed to find them humanly shaped.
He signed his name, and added a postscript: “Would like to speak to you again. There’s much I haven’t said that may interest you. I have always felt a remarkable exhiliration being among people with a purpose and sense of dedication to carry out that purpose. I felt this about you in your presence.”
“Those prairiebillys, they’ll vote to hang fast as pigs eat slop. Look at their eyes. I’ll be damned if I’m the only killer in the courtroom”).
When rational motives are conspicuous (for example, when a man kills for personal gain) or when the irrational motives are accompanied by delusions or hallucinations (for example, a paranoid patient who kills his fantasied persecutor), the situation presents little problem to the psychiatrist. But murderers who seem rational, coherent, and controlled, and yet whose homicidal acts have a bizarre, apparently senseless quality, pose a difficult problem, if courtroom disagreements and contradictory reports about the same offender are an index.
“What’s unfair?” “The whole trial. These guys don’t stand a chance.” “Fat chance they gave Nancy Clutter.” “Perry Smith. My God. He’s had such a rotten life—” Parr said, “Many a man can match sob stories with that little bastard. Me included. Maybe I drink too much, but I sure as hell never killed four people in cold blood.”
At the door, Smith said to Hickock, “No chicken-hearted jurors, they!” They both laughed loudly, and a cameraman photographed them. The picture appeared in a Kansas paper above a caption entitled: “The Last Laugh?”
The Brothers Karamazov.
IN THE DISPOSITION OF CAPITAL cases in the United States, the median elapsed time between sentence and execution is approximately seventeen months.
“I think,” he said, “it’s a helluva thing to take a life in this manner. I don’t believe in capital punishment, morally or legally. Maybe I had something to contribute, something—” His assurance faltered; shyness blurred his voice, lowered it to a just audible level. “It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize.”
