Nicolas Hoffmann

“A correspondent asked why, if Bob was right-handed, he’d gripped the gun with his left, and Bob answered, as if nothing further needed saying, “Jesse was left-handed.”
― Ron Hansen, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

“They carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”
― Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

“October of 1883, Bob Ford could be identified correctly by more citizens than could the accidental president of the United States (Chester Alan Arthur); he was reported to be as renowned at twenty as Jesse was after fourteen years of grand larceny, and though it was by then a presumption on his part, it was unanticipated by others that a poised but unscrupulous young man could be thought dapper and tempting to women: the courtroom was as packed during his second-degree murder trial in Plattsburg as was the Mount Olivet Baptist Church when the corpse of Jesse Woodson James was prayed over and dispatched to his Maker, and as the correspondents noted the crowds inside and on the courthouse steps, they were surprised by the presence of otherwise sophisticated ladies, reading in this a proof of the young man’s beguiling powers.”
― Ron Hansen, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

“Bob was going on twenty-two when he went back to Kansas City to gamble for a living. He was dapper, glamorous, physically strong, comparatively rich, and psychologically injured. By his own approximation, Bob had by then assassinated Jesse over eight hundred times, and each repetition was much like the principal occasion: he suspected no one in history had ever so often or so publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal, and he imagined that no degree of grief or penitence could change the country’s ill-regard for him.”
― Ron Hansen, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford