Dangerous Ground Quotes

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”—Franz Kafka”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.”—William Hazlitt”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) claims, on average, 90,000 people are missing at any given time, about 33,000 of those children under the age of eighteen.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Alcohol, I knew from experience, has no mercy. Once it secures its talons into you, and you submit, your life is a shitstorm—that is, if it allows you to live.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“I’d never seen our father cry. Not one tear. Yet, while we sat, as families do, in the front row, inside the same funeral home where we’d said good-bye to Diane eight years earlier, I looked on as my dad, his shoulders bouncing up and down, cried. It was as though he’d held back the tears all his life, each one reserved for this day he undoubtedly knew—as far back as Mark’s teenage years—he’d bear witness to.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”—C.S. Lewis”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“No young girl, having tea in plastic cups and playing with her Barbie, dreams of becoming a drug-addicted street hooker. Your life should not be distilled into a noun. Moreover, from a law enforcement perspective, labels smother and tunnel an investigation at its fundamental core.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”—Marcel Proust”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“He anticipated the moment when they realized he was a serial killer. Thinking about that, he couldn’t face the rejection, ridicule, and public scorn about to fall on him. This was what kept him up at night. The only way out, he reconciled, was suicide.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Jesperson had a way of desensitizing himself to certain behaviors he understood to be ruthless, demeaning, and resentful.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“The tragedy in a man’s life is what dies inside of him while he lives.”—Albert Schweitzer”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“On my computer screen, inside the confines of my office, this crazy son of a bitch described killing Julie Winningham as if it were another day in the life of an over-the-road long-haul trucker. Here he was, twenty years later, laughing about it.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“The psychopath is continually focused on himself. There is no respite. He cannot view the world under any other context except for how he lives in it and what others can do for him.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“The fact that he referred to eight human beings as these people said it all. He couldn’t even dignify their lives or memories by calling them victims.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.”—Fyodor Dostoyevsky”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss? Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?”—Sylvia Plath”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Some serial killers have admitted this about themselves: they do not care about anyone and cannot love.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at change.”—Dr. Wayne W. Dyer”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”—Virginia Woolf”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“I considered that most serial killers, when you come down to it, are cowards. They’re full of fear.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Anytime a serial killer can be linked to hurting, torturing, maiming, or killing animals, it feeds the stereotype and ups his popularity. Indeed, many serials have a history of animal cruelty. But many more don’t.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Psychopaths: people who know the differences between right and wrong, but don’t give a shit… .”—Elmore Leonard”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Unusual and irrational thoughts plague serial killers, as they have no capacity for gratitude or concern.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Evil would never bring Good, however much they wanted to believe that it would. By the time they discovered the truth, it would be too late.”—Paulo Coelho, The Devil and Miss Prym”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“When I got divorced and we were in court, I looked at my kids and they were in pain. But here’s the thing—it made me feel warm inside to know that I was responsible for that pain. I actually was happy that they were suffering and would continue to suffer from the divorce.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”—V.S. Naipaul, In a Free State”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“In this moment of our lives, if there is one thing about my brother I can count on, it’s that his addiction runs his life and has him on a strict schedule.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Well, evil to some is always good to others.” —Jane Austen, Emma”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Dr. Kent Kiehl, neuroscientist and author of The Psychopath Whisperer, a man who’s dedicated his life’s work to clinical brain imaging in order to understand mental illness, especially criminal psychopathy, says, “The best current estimate is that just less than one percent of all noninstitutionalized males age eighteen and over are psychopaths.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer