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

“Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise.”—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables”
― 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

“Still, my faith was dissolving in a pool of indifference;”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Although an act of help done timely might be small in nature, it is truly larger than the world itself.”—Thiruvalluvar”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“We trouble our life by thoughts about death, and our death by thoughts about life.”—Michel de Montaigne”
― 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

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”—Mark Twain”
― 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

“One has to keep in mind that in befriending a serial killer, you are entering into a pact with the Devil, allowing him a portal into your life and soul.”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“WHEN YOU ARE IN their presence, serial killers project a nervous, calculating, saturating energy, draining your vitality.”
― 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

“It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.”—Joel Coen”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Amends. Forgiveness. Isn’t that the only way to move forward?”
― 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

“A friend to him was someone who had something he could use that he wanted.”
― 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

“It’s easy to deny your own problems or even consider they exist when you focus on someone else’s.”
― 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

“We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.”—Oscar Wilde”
― M. William Phelps, Dangerous Ground: My Friendship with a Serial Killer

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.”—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room”
― 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