The Alienist Quotes

“The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Change isn't something that most people enjoy, even if it's progressive change.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves "New York Society.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“We are not obligated to provide everyone who comes to this country with a good life,” Morgan went on. “We are obligated to provide them with a chance to attain that life, through discipline and hard work. That chance is more than they have anywhere else. That is why they keep coming.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“They’ll want him to be mad, of course,’ Laszlo mused, not hearing me. ‘The doctors here, the newspapers, the judges; they’d like to think that only a madman would shoot a five-year-old girl in the head. It creates certain … difficulties, if we are forced to accept that our society can produce sane men who commit such acts.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“... 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.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Both Kreizler and I had seen all this before, but familiarity did not breed acceptance.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others;
whatever seemed wrong to me,
others approved of.
I ran into feuds wherever I found myself,
I met disfavor wherever I went;
if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery;
so I had to be called “Woeful”:
Woe is all I possess.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“It is often difficult, I find, for people today to grasp the notion that one family, working through several restaurants could change the eating habit of an entire country. But such was the achievement of the Delmonicos in the United States of the last century. Before they opened their first small cafe on William Street in 1823, catering to the business and financial communities of Lower Manhattan, American food could generally be described as things boiled or fried whose purpose was to sustain hard work and hold down alcohol - usually bad alcohol. The Delmonicos, though Swiss, had brought the French method to America, and each generation of their family refined an expanded the experience ... The craving for first-rate dining became a kind of national fever in the latter decades of the century - and Delmonico's was responsible.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“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.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Kreizler emphasized that no good would come of conceiving of this person as a monster, because he was most assuredly a man (or a woman); and that man or woman had once been a child. First and foremost, we must get to know that child, and to know his parents, his siblings, his complete world. It was pointless to talk about evil and barbarity and madness; none of these concepts would lead us any closer to him. But if we could capture the human child in our imaginations – then we could capture the man in fact.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“The hateful relationship between Japheth Dury and his mother must, we reasoned, have spilled over into self-hatred, as well—for how could any boy despised by his mother fail to question his own worth?”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“the defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people,”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others;
whatever seemed wrong to me,
others approved of.
I ran into feuds wherever I found myself,
I met disfavor wherever I went;
if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery;
so I had to be called “Woeful”:
Woe is all I possess. Wagner,
Die Walküre”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“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. Those experts who studied mental pathologies were therefore known as alienists.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“great sport, during their few idle hours, of sitting in the house’s green-shuttered windows and watching the doings at headquarters through opera glasses, then offering commentary to passing police officials.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Inevitably, I became distracted by tales that I knew held no promise for us—accounts of murders that had long since been solved, or whose salient characteristics were nothing like those of our case—but which were so morbidly fascinating on their own merits that I had to see how they turned out.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“like the only hummable tune in a difficult opera.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“A noi fa piacere che uomini come Beecham esistano: essi incarnano tutto ciò che vi è di oscuro nel nostro mondo, nella nostra società. Ma le cose che hanno fatto di Beecham un mostro? Bè, quelle le tolleriamo, anzi, ne godiamo...”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“I'd seen this happen several times before, in different institutions, but it was no less remarkable on each occasion: the words were like the flow of water over coals, taking away crackling heat and leaving only a steaming whisper, a perhaps momentary but nonetheless effective remission from deep-burning fire.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“marks Marcus had originally thought to be left by pitons at that site were therefore made by something else, probably something altogether unconnected to our case).”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“Scientists’ minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and the temerity to style themselves “New York Society.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“We’re all still running, according to Kreizler—in our private moments we Americans are running just as fast and fearfully as we were then, running away from the darkness we know to lie behind so many apparently tranquil household doors, away from the nightmares that continue to be injected into children’s skulls by people whom Nature tells them they should love and trust, running ever faster and in ever greater numbers toward those potions, powders, priests, and philosophies that promise to obliterate such fears and nightmares, and ask in return only slavish devotion.”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist

“intersection of Broadway and Houston Street. Here, it was once sagely remarked, you could fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man;”
― Caleb Carr, The Alienist