My Dark Places Quotes

“Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places

“She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places

“I didn’t know that costs accrue. I didn’t know that you always pay for what you suppress.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“I want to burn down the distance between us>”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places

“They moved me and scared me. I replayed the tapes and nailed the source of my fear. The women sounded smug. They were entrenched and content in their victimhood.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places

“Narrative was my moral language.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places

“I was a case study in teenage intransigence. I held an ironclad, steel-buffed, pathologically derived and empirically valid hole card: the ability to withdraw and inhabit a world of my own mental making. Friendship meant minor indignities. Raucous laughs with the guys meant assuming a subservient role. The cost felt negligible. I knew how to reap profit from estrangement. I didn’t know that costs accrue. I didn’t know that you always pay for what you suppress.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“You fooled people. You gave yourself out in small increments and reinvented yourself at whim. Your secret ways nullified the means to mark your death with vengeance. I thought I knew you. I passed my childish hatred off as intimate knowledge. I never mourned you. I assailed your memory. You fronted a stern rectitude. You cut it loose on Saturday nights. Your brief reconciliations drove you chaotic. I won’t define you that way. I won’t give up your secrets so cheaply. I want to learn where you buried your love.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“The system worked because felons and misdemeanants plead guilty most of the time and did not file nuisance appeals routinely. The system worked because pre-breakdown jail time was doable. Criminals were pre-psychologized. They accepted authority. They knew they were lowlife scum because they saw it on TV and read it in the papers. They were locked into a rigged game. Authority usually won. They took pleasure in picayune triumphs and reveled in the game’s machinations. The game was insiderism. Insiderism and fatalism were hip. If you stayed shy of the gas chamber, the worst you’d get was penitentiary time. Pre-breakdown joint time was doable. You could drink pruno and fuck sissies in the ass. The system worked because America was yet to buck race riots and assassinations and environmental bullshit and gender confusion and drug proliferation and gun mania and religious psychoses linked to a media implosion and an emerging cult of victimhood—a 25-year transit of divisive bad juju that resulted in a stultifying mass skepticism.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places

“L.A. Weekly piece was coming out in mid-February. Day One”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“Calculating psychopaths don’t shit where they eat.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“John Purvis joined his mother and lawyer on the Phil Donahue show.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“His father was named Bob Beckett Sr. He used to live with him in Torrance—down by Redondo Beach and Palos Verdes. His father was an artist. He ran a rinky-dink art school and made extra cash as a strongarm enforcer. He collected money for some mob-connected guys in San Pedro. His father was 6′4″, 270. His father knew karate. His father was in the Society for Creative Anachronisms—this group where people acted out this weird medieval shit. His father hung out with a faggy guy named Paul Serio. Paul Serio was a big shot in that weird society. His father was 45 years old now. His father was a baaad son-of-a-bitch.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“Mini-Manson” case”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“Cotton Club murder”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“Gambling was a chickenshit obsession. The big thrill was the risk of self-annihilation and the shot at transcendence through money. Sex obsession was love six times or six thousand times removed. Both compulsions mortified. Both compulsions destroyed. Gambling was always about self-abnegation and money. Sex was a stupid glandular disposition and sometimes the route to big bad love.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“They saw the O.J. job as a crass microcosm. It was cocaine and tit jobs. It was health club narcissism and the two-way bondage of five-figure monthly alimony payments. The bottom-level audience defined the crime. They wanted O.J.’s meretricious lifestyle. They couldn’t have it. They settled for a skanky morality play that told them that lifestyle was venal.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“Stoner learned that men killed women for lawn mowers and crockpots.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“The system worked because America was yet to buck race riots and assassinations and environmental bullshit and gender confusion and drug proliferation and gun mania and religious psychoses linked to a media implosion and an emerging cult of victimhood—a 25-year transit of divisive bad juju that resulted in a stultifying mass skepticism.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography

“I was afraid of all girls, most boys and selected male and female adults. My fear derived from my apocalyptic fantasy apparatus. I knew that all things went chaotically bad. My empirical training in chaos was unassailably valid.”
― James Ellroy, My Dark Places: A True Crime Autobiography