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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“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, quote from Children of Time
“You're my pet Voidbringer, and no lies are going to change that. I got you captured. No stealing souls, now. We ain't here for souls. Just a little thievery, the type what never hurt nobody.”
― Brandon Sanderson, quote from Edgedancer
“God was all powerful and omniscient, and he alone defined truth and indeed was truth. But he did not assert that power in a way that ever smacked of power in the worldly sense. He had always and ever shown himself in weakness. Jesus washed the feet of his disciples. Jesus died on the cross for those who had mocked and rejected him. God did not crush us but showed us mercy, and Luther could see that the church had not adopted this view, but had itself become wed to worldly power. It took money that was not its own and burned those who disagreed with what it taught. Luther was trying to call the church back to its true roots, to a biblical idea of a merciful God who did not demand that we obey but who first loved us and first made us righteous before he expected us to live righteously.”
― Eric Metaxas, quote from Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World
“My God, Seelichka. Even though they cut into your brain, even though they rewired you, you held on to him. No wonder Mishka calls you Silver Fucking Mercant.”
― Nalini Singh, quote from Silver Silence
“(We) consist of everything the world consists of, each of us, and just as our body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back as the fish and even much further, so we bear everything in our soul that once was alive in the soul of men. Every god and devil that ever existed, be it among the Greeks, Chinese, or Zulus, are within us, exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as alternatives. If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament.”
― Hermann Hesse, quote from Demian
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