The Executioner's Song Quotes

“Historical, religious, and existential treatises suggest that for some persons at some times, it is rational not to avoid physical death at all costs. Indeed the spark of humanity can maximize its essence by choosing an alternative that preserves the greatest dignity and some tranquility of mind.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“He did a terrible thing and eliminating him would have left the world tidier. Or so goes the logic of the last fifty years of American justice. We throw away flawed people, people who have made terrible mistakes, with regularity and great alacrity. We jail drug dealers for decades, and we execute killers. We want them away. Out of sight.”
― Dave Eggers, The Executioner's Song

“This business of living for eternity certainly contributed to capital punishment, brutality, and war.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“It was better than floods of misery that a son of her flesh had killed the sons of other mothers. That burned in her heart like the pain which flared in the arthritis of her knees. Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics. Bess”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Finally he said, “I like everything that wild Irish maniac, J. P. Donleavy, ever wrote.” It wasn’t so much a discussion as a sharing of taste. He also liked The Agony and the Ecstasy and Lust for Life by Irving Stone.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“but when the call came from Shirley Pedler to help in organizing the Utah Coalition Against the Death Penalty, she knew she would go out in the world again with her freaky blond hair, blond to everyone’s disbelief—at the age of fifty-four, go out in her denims and chin-length-hanging-down-straight vanilla hair to that Salt Lake world where nobody would ever make the mistake of thinking she was a native Utah lady inasmuch as Utah was the Beehive State. The girls went big for vertical hair-dos, pure monuments to shellac.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Pain was a boring conversationalist who never stopped, just found new topics.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“What have we accomplished? There aren’t going to be less murders.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“but I am infinitely more sorrowful about the two victims’ families than the fact Mr. Gilmore is no longer alive.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“When you start to open a door, the pressure has to be greatest in the beginning, yet the door moves the least.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“It was getting to be the best conversation she ever had. She had always thought the only way to have conversations like that was in your head. Then”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Then the Warden said, “Do you have anything you’d like to say?” and Gary looked up at the ceiling and hesitated, then said, “Let’s do it.” That was it. The most pronounced amount of courage, Vern decided, he’d ever seen, no quaver, no throatiness, right down the line.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Brenda was six when she fell out of the apple tree.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Maybe it’s not what we learn that’s crucial, but the questions we’re left with. Will we always be a manic-depressive nation of the greatest and most vile achievements? Will we always be a nation of both astronauts and mass-murderers?”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Hey, there’s a place in the darkness. You know what I mean? I think I met you there. I knew you there.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“He was released in 2006, and his memoir, the book for which he was getting the prize in Dayton, In the Place of Justice, tells his story, from being a confused kid caught in a bank robbery gone bad, to a man who had fully taken”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“I know you,” Gilmore says the first time he meets Nicole. He doesn’t mean they’ve met before; they haven’t. They meet by chance at a friend’s house, and immediately he says that to her: “I know you.” And he means he knows that she, like him, is incomplete, wayward, prone to terrible mistakes. They talk late into the night. He asks her, “Hey, there’s a place in the darkness. You know what I mean? I think I met you there. I knew you there.” And so begins one of the most convincing love stories in all of American literature.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“The terrible, exasperating thing about humans is how goodness and gentleness, and utter depravity and disregard for human life, can be contained within the same person, and in terrifyingly close proximity.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“She had built up a lot of control over all these months, but suddenly it just hurt so bad that she bawled right there at the table, two seconds after she saw the broken ring. It was the first real big cry she’d had about Gary in a long time, a month or so. She was not sure there was any such thing anymore as Gary. She didn’t know if that was where her belief rested. He was a lot out of her mind. He might really be dead.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“The thought Nicole really wanted to lose was that there was no more Gary. It was a possibility she did not like to consider. It was too depressing to believe he might not be on the other side.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Once in a while, like a mist passing across the sky, she would feel a strange communion with him, as if a thought had passed back and forth, and she felt happy that the strain was removed from his life and he had been set free. It was paradoxical, but she felt good about that.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“If he had wanted to work himself silly just to make sure each little job was done right, then he better develop himself emotionally to a point where he didn’t care who got the publicity.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Bessie could not keep from thinking, “His nightmare will be over, but mine will never be.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“GILMORE    I’ve talked to people who know more than I do, and people who know less, and I listen, and I decided the only fucking thing I know about death, the only real feeling I have about it, it’ll be familiar; I don’t think it’ll be a harsh, unkind thing. Things that’re harsh and unkind, are here on earth, and they’re temporary. They don’t last. This all passes. That is my summation of my ideas, and I might be all wet.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“No psychic reward might be so powerful as winning a dare with yourself. If you were really scared, and went through it, and came out on the other side intact, then it was hard not to believe for a little while that you were on the side of the gods. It felt as if you could do no wrong. Time slowed. You were no longer doing it. For good or ill, it was doing it. You had entered the logic of that other scheme where death and life had as many relations as Yin and Yang.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Outside, in the summer light, the horseflies were mean as insanity itself.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Nobody is ever really free, Gary. As long as you live with another human being, you’re not free.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Capital punishment is symbolic of society’s determination to enforce all of its laws. If we don’t enforce the severest of our laws, the criminal mind might conclude (punishments of) other laws won’t be imposed against them,”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“It was as if he was saying good-bye to a man who was going to step into a cannon and be fired to the moon, or dropped in an iron chamber to the bottom of the sea, a veritable Houdini. He grasped both of Gilmore’s hands and it didn’t matter if the man was a murderer, he could just as well have been a saint, for either at this moment seemed equally beyond Schiller’s way of measure—and he said, he heard it come out of him, “I don’t know what I’m here for.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song

“Dear Mrs. Gilmore, it’s going to be alright. Only 4 of the 5 rifles are really loaded.”
― Norman Mailer, The Executioner's Song