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
“The penance is the most important part. It shows everyone that he’s serious. You know, it’s almost like a kind of ceremony. It proves the strength of his conviction. It shows everyone that he doesn’t care how much he may suffer, he’ll still beat the crap out of anyone who threatens you.”
“But I don’t like the idea of someone else being whipped on my account.”
― Ginn Hale, quote from Lord of the White Hell, Book 1
“The most important tool ultimately is the person and his or her makeup, and yet it seems to get the least amount of attention and work.”
― Henry Cloud, quote from Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality
“Imagine considering every moment as a potential time of communion with God. By the time your life is over, you will have spent six months at stoplights, eight months opening junk mail, a year and a half looking for lost stuff (double that number in my case), and a whopping five years standing in various lines.7Why don’t you give these moments to God? By giving God your whispering thoughts, the common becomes uncommon. Simple phrases such as “Thank you, Father,” “Be sovereign in this hour, O Lord,” “You are my resting place, Jesus” can turn a commute into a pilgrimage. You needn’t leave your office or kneel in your kitchen. Just pray where you are. Let the kitchen become a cathedral or the classroom a chapel. Give God your whispering thoughts.”
― Max Lucado, quote from Just Like Jesus: Learning to Have a Heart Like His
“What we’re in is a vacuum.”
― Henning Mankell, quote from One Step Behind
“One has to know what it is to be alone, what it is to meditate, what it is to die; and the implications of solitude, of meditation, of death, can be known only by seeking them out. These implications cannot be taught, they must be learned.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, quote from Total Freedom: The Essential Krishnamurti
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