London Falling Quotes

“It is easy to charm a person who talks too much: all you have to do is listen.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“But they were also determined to get Zac into treatment. Akbar found a program run by the Church of Scientology”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“For some time after Anne's death, Otto had been unable to bring himself to read the diary. But when he finally picked up this private document that his child had left behind, he was startled by the depth and nuance of her reflections. "It was quite a different Anne than I had known as my daughter," Frank said, in his careful, accented English. "What really her feelings were, I could only see from the diary." Otto had been very close to Anne, he pointed out, so it was interesting to consider how little he had understood about her. "Most parents don't know, really, their children," he said.

That feeling Frank describes, of not being able to fully understand one's own adolescent child, has surely been compounded for parents in the era of social media.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“One day Matthew was listening to a podcast (he listened to a lot of podcasts) and heard a story about the early years of Bob Dylan. When Dylan was barely out of his teens and just starting his career, he used to tell fantastical stories about how he had been raised in Gallup, New Mexico, and run off as a child to join the carnival. He claimed that he was a descendent of the Sioux Nation and that when he first got to New York, he made ends meet by turning tricks in Times Square. None of this was true. In fact, even his name was an invention: Dylan was born Robert Allen Zimmerman, and he had a conventional suburban upbringing in Hibbing, Minnesota. In 1963, when he was twenty-two years old, he told an interviewer in New York, “I don’t know my parents. They don’t know me. I’ve lost contact with them,” though his parents were at that very moment staying in a hotel around the corner, because he had invited them to watch him perform at Carnegie Hall. “For Dylan, it became a game,” Matthew said to Rachelle. “He created all sorts of elaborate tales about himself.” He was a trickster who confected a mysterious persona that may have been ridiculous but ultimately served him well. If you mentioned those adolescent fibs to Dylan today, he would probably “laugh about it,” Matthew ventured. “But there are lots of people out there who have created a fantasy existence for themselves. And it hasn’t prevented them from operating in the real world when their feet finally hit the ground.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth