The Alienist

The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.

Imagine, [Kriezler] said, that you enter a large, somewhat crumbling hall that echoes with the sounds of people mumbling and talking repetitively to themselves. All around you these people fall into prostrate positions, some of them weeping. Where are you? Sara’s answer was immediate: in an asylum. Perhaps, Kreizler answered, but you could also be in a church. In the one place the behavior would be considered mad; in the other, not only sane, but as respectable as any human activity can be.

It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves "New York Society.

Scientists' minds may jump around like amorous toads, but they do seem to accept such behavior in one another.

Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.

Both Kreizler and I had seen all this before, but familiarity did not breed acceptance.

It is often difficult, I find, for people today to grasp the notion that one family, working through several restaurants could change the eating habit of an entire country. But such was the achievement of the Delmonicos in the United States of the last century. Before they opened their first small cafe on William Street in 1823, catering to the business and financial communities of Lower Manhattan, American food could generally be described as things boiled or fried whose purpose was to sustain hard work and hold down alcohol - usually bad alcohol. The Delmonicos, though Swiss, had brought the French method to America, and each generation of their family refined an expanded the experience ... The craving for first-rate dining became a kind of national fever in the latter decades of the century - and Delmonico's was responsible.

I'd seen this happen several times before, in different institutions, but it was no less remarkable on each occasion: the words were like the flow of water over coals, taking away crackling heat and leaving only a steaming whisper, a perhaps momentary but nonetheless effective remission from deep-burning fire.

... belief that the answers one gives to life's crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.

Change isn't something that most people enjoy, even if it's progressive change.

How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?

We are not obligated to provide everyone who comes to this country with a good life,” Morgan went on. “We are obligated to provide them with a chance to attain that life, through discipline and hard work. That chance is more than they have anywhere else. That is why they keep coming.

Whatever I thought right seemed bad to others; whatever seemed wrong to me, others approved of. I ran into feuds wherever I found myself, I met disfavor wherever I went; if I longed for happiness, I only stirred up misery; so I had to be called “Woeful”: Woe is all I possess.

The hateful relationship between Japheth Dury and his mother must, we reasoned, have spilled over into self-hatred, as well—for how could any boy despised by his mother fail to question his own worth?

troubled than my own—had fallen off a Boston boat and drowned. A lengthy autopsy revealed what I could have

P198 Describe John Moore’s brother’s death: but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essentially the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled. Unfortunately, I’d stated this opinion during the funeral, and was nearly forced into an asylum as a result.

P252 Habit dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.

but it was one of those all-too-common moments in New York when one is faced with a damnable set of options.

but none of whom gave the impression of being willing to put up with questionable behavior from anyone else ever again.

answers one gives to life’s crucial questions are never truly spontaneous; they are the embodiment of years of contextual experience, of the building of patterns in each of our lives that eventually grow to dominate our behavior.

Woe is all I possess. Wagner, Die Walküre

like the only hummable tune in a difficult opera.

what if our murderer viewed his current work as just that sort of protection? Could Sara shift her point of view enough to grasp that every victim and situation leading up to a murder resonated within the killer to a distant experience of threat and violence and led him for reasons that we had not yet fully defined to take angry measures in his own defense?

you cannot objectify the subjective, you cannot generalize the specific.

Inevitably, I became distracted by tales that I knew held no promise for us—accounts of murders that had long since been solved, or whose salient characteristics were nothing like those of our case—but which were so morbidly fascinating on their own merits that I had to see how they turned out.

the eminent physician and alienist, my good friend Dr. Laszlo Kreizler.

intersection of Broadway and Houston Street. Here, it was once sagely remarked, you could fire a shotgun in any direction without hitting an honest man;

Change isn't something most people enjoye, even if it's progressive change.