Ann Rule · 560 pages
Rating: (43.9K votes)
“Just be careful," a Seattle homicide detective warned. "Maybe we'd better know where to find your dental records in case we need to identify you."
I laughed, but the words were jarring; the black humor that would surround Ted Bundy evermore begun.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“Some people hate the smell of hospitals. I hate the smell of jails and prisons, all the same: stale cigarette smoke, Pine-Sol, urine, sweat, and dust.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t feel any pain—not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I’ve known that the soul doesn’t die, only the body, and I’ve never been afraid.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“The most basic bit of advice given to women who have to walk alone at night is, ‘Look alert. Be aware of your surroundings and walk briskly. You will be safer if you know where you are going, and if anyone who observes you senses that.’ The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“Yet, in reality, Ted loved things more than he loved people. He could find life in an abandoned bicycle or an old car, and feel a kind of compassion for these inanimate objects, more compassion than he could ever feel for another human being.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“Dr. Benjamin Spock, who worked in a veterans’ hospital dealing with emotional illnesses during World War II, commented at the time that there was a pronounced cross-sex problem in dealing with psychopathic personalities. The male psychopaths had no difficulty in bewitching female staff members, while the male staff picked up on them rapidly. The female psychopaths could fool the male staff but not the women.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“When we finally left the storms of the Midwest behind us, I turned to the man beside me, a Boeing engineer, and asked him if he had been afraid. “No. I’ve already been there.” It was a strange answer. He explained that he had been clinically dead as a youth, crushed beneath a car after he and several friends had hit a utility pole. “I watched from somewhere up above and saw the troopers lift the car off someone. Then I saw that it was me lying there. I wasn’t afraid, and I didn’t feel any pain—not until I woke up in the hospital three days later. Since then, I’ve known that the soul doesn’t die, only the body, and I’ve never been afraid.” I”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“In all human endeavors that deal with what is unthinkable, too terrible to be dealt with squarely, we turn to what is familiar and regimented: funerals, wakes, and even wars. Now, in this trial, we had gone beyond our empathy with the pain of the victims and our niggling realization that the defendant was a fragmented personality. He knew the rules, he even knew a great deal about the law, but he did not seem to be cognizant of what was about to happen to him. He seemed to consider himself irrefragable. And what was about to happen to him was vital for the good of society. I could not refute that. It had to be, but it seemed hollow that none of us understood that his ego, our egos and the rituals of the courtroom itself, the jokes and the nervous laughter were veiling the gut reactions that we should all be facing. We were all on “this railroad train running …”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“I had long since managed a degree of detachment when dealing with photographs from homicide cases. They no longer upset me as they once did, although I make it a point not to dwell on them. By the time I stood in Shirley Lewis’s office, I had seen thousands of body pictures. I had seen pictures of Kathy Devine and Brenda Baker in Thurston County, but that was months before it was known there was a “Ted.” Of course, there were no bodies to photograph in the other Washington cases, and I had had no access to Colorado or Utah pictures. Now, I was staring down at huge color photographs of the damage done to girls young enough to be my daughters—at pictures of damage alleged to be the handiwork of a man I thought I knew. That man who only minutes before had smiled the same old grin at me, and shrugged as if to say, “I have no part of this.” It hit me with a terrible sickening wave. I ran to the ladies’ room and threw up.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“And, like all the others, I have been manipulated to suit Ted’s needs. I don’t feel particularly embarrassed or resentful about that. I was one of many, all of us intelligent, compassionate people who had no real comprehension of what possessed him, what drove him obsessively.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“Conscience doth make cowards of us all,” but conscience is what gives us our humanity, the factor that separates us from animals. It allows us to love, to feel another’s pain, and to grow. Whatever the drawbacks are to being blessed with a conscience, the rewards are essential to living in a world with other human beings.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“I ended that letter, 'There is nothing in this life that is a complete tragedy - nothing - try to remember that.' Looking back, I wonder at my naiveté. Some things in life ARE complete tragedies. Ted Bundy's story may well be one of them.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“Detective Norman M. Chapman, Jr., was on call that night. Chapman is a man with a voice like warm maple syrup.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“Any of us who have raised children know, as John F. Kennedy once said, that “to have children is to give hostages to fate.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
“The stalking, predatory animal cuts the weakest from the pack, and then kills at his leisure.”
― Ann Rule, quote from The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story
Ann Rule
Born place: in Lowell, Michigan, The United States
Born date October 22, 1931
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“The broken are not always gathered together,of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies" but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Childeren are killed. Madamen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessy mourned. loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; Over roads new printed with their foot steps,the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities people with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stuberness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. we can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way.”
― Stephanie Kallos, quote from Broken for You
“Jack might look my age, but he was like a little kid on a sugar high --- in need of a good spanking. --- Good heavens, that sounded creepy.”
― Kiersten White, quote from Supernaturally
“Cyrus is quiet for a momenr. "But-" he beginds, then falls silent. It's the first crack I've seen in his composure. "But," he tries again, "she's special. To me."
His words make me feel light, like ash floating away from a fire.
Johann begins to laugh, bitterly, mirthlessly. "Don't tell me you love her," he spits. "You don't even know her. That's the most irrational thing I've ever heard. And no love can survive immortality."
The room is quiet, filled only with the crackling of the fire, and suddenly I don't want to hear Cyrus's answer. What if he doesn't love me? What am I without him by my side? Some strange creature that no one believes exists, some freak of nature, some threat to the reassuring rhythms of normal life.
Finally, Cyrus speaks. "All I know is that I'm drawn to her. You always told me there's no such thing as destiny, and I believed you. I still do. But she makes me wonder. I fI could love anyone forever, it would be her. When I'm with her, I feel complete.”
― Avery Williams, quote from The Alchemy of Forever
“They cannot degrade Frederick Douglass. The soul that is within me no man can degrade. I am not the one that is being degraded on account of this treatment, but those who are inflicting it upon me.”
― Booker T. Washington, quote from Up from Slavery
“The human brain can only be stretched so far before it breaks.”
― Erin Bowman, quote from Taken
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