Sarah Weinman > Quotes

“The appreciation of art can make a sucker out of those who forget the darkness of real life.”
― Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

“Common law had it that conjugal rights were forever, at any time, at any place, and by any means necessary. Marital rape, then, was an impossibility, an unresolvable paradox. How can you rape someone when the law says she is permanently, and irrevocably, at your beck and call, subject to your every whim, however violent and damaging?”
― Sarah Weinman, Without Consent: A Landmark Trial and the Decades-Long Struggle to Make Spousal Rape a Crime

“He meant to stay nearby with the McCoos, parents to “two little daughters, one a baby the other a girl of twelve.” Lodging there, he assumed, would allow him to “coach in French and fondle in Humbertish.”
― Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World

“He had spent the previous year sharpening his observations of quotidian matters. He noted down all sorts of minutiae, the better to portray the American prepubescent girl at the heart of his novel with greater accuracy. Nabokov recorded heights and weights, average age of first menstruation, attitude changes, even the “proper method of inserting an enema tip into a rectum.”
― Sarah Weinman, The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World

“IT IS DIFFICULT TO SEE TED BUNDY AS HUMAN. IT IS DIFFICULT even to entertain the belief that he did not need to destroy as many lives as he did, or that his own life could have been different. Believing this means believing that Ted Bundy and others who commit crimes like his are not born irreparably wrong, are not unavoidably evil, do not belong to a separate species from the rest of us. This is a frightening conclusion to draw: that the actions and crimes and atrocities we so often call “inhuman” do, in fact, belong to humanity, because they are committed by human beings. Rejecting the label of “psychopath,” not just for Ted Bundy but for anyone, means accepting that it is not a hard, scientific fact that we could never do what they have done—and that we could, under different circumstances, go down the same path they did.”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“In 2011, Families for Freedom, a nonprofit immigrant rights organization, obtained documents through FOIA litigation showing that agents at a single Border Patrol station in Rochester had wrongfully arrested nearly 300 US citizens and legal immigrants during a four- year period. The only way that CBP measured its effectiveness, the group found, was through its apprehension rates. Agents in Buffalo were offered cash bonuses, prizes, and extra vacation time if they boosted their arrest numbers, fostering a dragnet approach to enforcement that targeted people of color.”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“To be an adolescent girl is, for many, to view yourself as desperately set apart, powerfully misunderstood. A special alien, terrible and extraordinary”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“Like Mickey Rooney playing that Chinaman in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”
― Sarah Weinman, The Dame

“He goes out and gets himself engaged to Marjorie Main.” “Marjorie Main? Belle didn’t look—”
― Sarah Weinman, The Dame

“What made you the way you were? Which chemicals did your brain misproduce, which cells didn’t divide, how many crucial grains of love and nurture were blown out of your life and allowed to stay in mine at the moment when they most mattered?”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“Down City by Leah Carroll, Mean by Myriam Gurba, The Hot One by Carolyn Murnick, After the Eclipse by Sarah Perry, and We Are All Shipwrecks by Kelly Grey Carlisle”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“The fascination with murder and illegality is a perennial one, because the shock of the deed creates a schism between order and chaos. We wish for justice, but even when we get it, the result rings somewhat hollow. We gorge on facts and innuendo but are then left with the hangover of trauma, the aftermath of a system that too often fails people. We crave a narrative that restores righteousness but are left with scraps of barely connected meaning.”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“does feel like a shame that so many resources are going to create slick, smart true crime that asks the wrong questions, focusing our energy on individual stories instead of the systemic problems they represent.”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“because looking at it too closely would mean witnessing your evil, and knowing that it burned in me, too. Isn’t that what all these terrified men see when they look at you, Ted? But we can be scared this way only by beliefs we feel we could share. I do”
― Sarah Weinman, Unspeakable Acts: True Tales of Crime, Murder, Deceit, and Obsession

“entered the rain forest, but he was sure it was still back there. This road went nowhere but to the rain forest and through it and out the other side, finally meeting route 31 between Naguabo and Juncos. The eight-kilometer marker had just gone by, so that meant the next possible place was just ahead. This one Grofield thought the least likely, because it was the most popular with tourists. No. There it was, and no cars were parked there at all. “What’s that?” Pat said,”
― Sarah Weinman, The Dame