The Silent Girls Quotes

“He wasn’t the young man he’d once been, and he did not grieve the loss.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“What greater gift could a parent give a child than independence?”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“This was the trouble with lying: it bred paranoia.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“godless serpent”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“He can’t be let out,” he said. “Odds are he won’t be.” “Odds? We gamble on the Preachers of the world with the lives of little girls.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“Now that Rath was north of forty, he didn’t trust a doctor younger than forty-five, kids who couldn’t relate to the tolling bell of mortality accompanying daily life.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“A girl gone missing against her will, nine times out of ten, was dead within three hours. Usually after being raped.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“It was a loathsome fact about the human condition: Wherever there were girls, some would go missing, plucked like errant threads from the fabric of everyday life and cast into a lurid nightmare of someone else’s making.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“It’s not just the facts, it’s how you interpret them.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“As much as she was capable at deciphering the motives of others, she was dreadful at doing the same for herself.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“Violence lurked here as it did the world over, most often exacted by known parties. Intimate, familial, and unspeakable.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“By night, moose haunted the roadsides, licking salt left by plows. By day, one of the creatures might be spied farther off in the swamp, dipping its great head into the bog, then lifting it ponderously, water pouring in strings from a head of an outsized, prehistoric horse, sullen eyes of a cow, and drooping lower lip of a giraffe.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“records”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“reached north to the Saint Lawrence and west to Ottawa. Hence: whalebones. Those early years, Rath had been obsessed with the violence of nature and how it shaped the physical world. As he’d grown older, his fixation had shifted from the violence of nature to the nature of violence, and how to stop it. Rath turned north onto”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“Violence lurked here as it did the world over, most often exacted by known parties. Intimate, familial, and unspeakable. He’d always wondered why people in rural areas, when interviewed after appalling violence, said, “This isn’t supposed to happen here.” As if violence had forgotten to keep itself within some prescribed geographic boundary.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“victim’s rights to keep the criminal locked up.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“a liberal who used human-rights issues to benefit and free criminals rather than think of the victim’s”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“The whole world was weakening. He wondered if in two hundred years, humans would be reduced to gelatinous blobs hooked up to feeding tubes.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“Blame it on their losing the parent lottery.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“filed”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“Grout went to the side of”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“near where Julia was found. Clean. No physical”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“A cop has to believe.” “In what?” “The law. The system. I don’t. I can’t.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“In 1862, whalebones had been unearthed by a farmer’s plow blade in the surrounding fields; eleven thousand years before the world’s most famed carpenter supposedly rose again, the glaciers had retreated, and the Atlantic had rushed in, creating a paratropical ocean that for three thousand years reached north to the Saint Lawrence and west to Ottawa. Hence: whalebones.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“What Purple Hair had said rooted in her mind like a malignant tumor. She wanted to take a knife and cut it out.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“Squirrels scampered in the road, performing their neurotic jig of indecision.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“That Preacher was even here today, given a pulpit from which to spin his web in a civil procedure, was a mockery of the system, or perhaps it revealed the system for what it was: inept and inadequate. Justice was blind all right—blind to its own failings.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“In my business, one thing you learn is to accept circumstances as they are and to recognize that cruel acts are done by the hands of some against the will of others, often only to get supreme satisfaction from the cruelty.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“A fucking masochist and a sadist. Worst of the nuts to crack: the ones who didn’t care what happened to themselves.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls

“It wasn’t even rebellion. It was an ecstatic pleasure taken from the debasement of other living creatures. Pure sadism.”
― Eric Rickstad, The Silent Girls