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

“The truth about parenthood, he concludes, is that it “abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.”
― 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

“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

“Grief might be a process, but it is not a problem that you solve.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling

“If you’re lying to your friends, it’s a bit of a lonely place to be, isn’t it?”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling

“Grief can function like a time machine. Life goes on: you return to work and celebrate the holidays and keep getting out of bed each day. Winter gives way to spring, one month leads to the next. But in your mind you keep getting jerked back to these specific painful moments in the past.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“One surreal feature of sudden loss is the manner in which moments of incredible pain can end up stitched into the more quotidian fabric of daily life.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“Grief might be a process”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“Zac had never been a particularly reliable narrator of his own life, but even in the darkest moments of the past two years, neither Matthew nor Rachelle had ever guessed that he could be running around adult London pretending to be somebody else altogether—much less doing so in a manner that real adults, people of substance, might actually fall for.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“As religious leaders go, the Aga Khan was no ascetic. Though technically imam to a flock of fifteen million Ismaili Muslims, he enjoyed the sybaritic lifestyle of a playboy from a royal family. This particular branch of lineal descendants of the Prophet Muhammad had become extraordinarily prosperous over the decades. With billions of dollars in assets and business interests ranging from insurance to airlines to hospitality, the Aga Khan had a staff of 150; split his time between a château in France, a villa on Lake Geneva, a private island in the Bahamas, and other properties around the globe; and ferried between these homes in a fleet of Mercedes and a Gulfstream jet. He owned some six hundred horses, which he stabled at estates in Ireland and Normandy. Though he shunned publicity, he was a fixture in gossip columns because of his colorful family (his father, a famous lothario, married Rita Hayworth) and his tendency to mingle with the rich and glamorous in places such as Ascot, St. Moritz, and the Costa Smeralda.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“But several brave men joined forces to suppress the attacker: a Polish porter armed himself by pulling an ornamental spear from the wall, while a South African–born civil servant grabbed a decorative narwhal tusk.”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth

“Increasingly”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling

“ONE FRIDAY IN AUGUST 1972”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling

“In 2008”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling

“At least the air was clear. The word ‘smog’ had been invented in London”
― Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling

“choreographer Gillian Lynne, who was famous for choreographing the show Cats. When she designed the dance numbers for the original”
― 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