Becky Cooper > Quotes

“There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“How many people's lived experiences were erased by the desire to simplify the past for the purposes of the present?”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“Part of why I love New York so deeply is exactly this elusiveness. This refusal to be caught is what allows it to carry such fantasy, mystery and myth, yet also be home. It is simultaneously no one's city and everyone's city.”
― Becky Cooper, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers

“Even after three hundred maps have been handed out, Ama and I still melt the moment people switch from being suspicious that we want to sell them something--"Hey? What do you want? Money? Directions?--to realising that we just want to know their stories, their memories, what they love--"Oh, in that case, thanks, sweeties!”
― Becky Cooper, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers

“Perhaps Jane’s story was a morality tale in more ways than I had realized. Not only did it serve as a narrative check on someone with power, like Karl, who was seen as transgressing, it was also a way of cautioning against promiscuous, assertive behavior from someone in Jane’s position: a female graduate student. Assigning guilt to the victim helped distance us from what happened to her; it wouldn’t happen to us, as long as we stayed in check.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“It struck me then that the way we relate to our dead is the oldest mark of our humanity. “The dead are kept close to you,” he said. I circled it in my notebook.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“Assigning guilt to the victim helped distance us from what happened to her; it wouldn’t happen to us, as long as we stayed in check. But in so doing, we had unconsciously been perpetuating a story whose moral derived from the very patriarchal system we thought we were surmounting by telling the story in the first place.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“There was an old joke that people who went into psychiatry were unhappy with themselves. Psychologists were unhappy with society. And anthropologists were people who were unhappy with their culture.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“...anthropologists, despite focusing their professional lives on observing the patterns of human behavior, might be no better than the rest of us at applying that lens to themselves”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“... any set of facts could conform to any narrative, if you chose to arrange it a certain way”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“I’m here because, for the past ten years, I have been haunted by a murder that took place a few steps away. It was told to me my junior year of college like a ghost story: A young woman, a Harvard graduate student of archaeology, was bludgeoned to death in her off-campus apartment in January 1969. Her body was covered with fur blankets and the killer threw red ochre on her body, a perfect re-creation of a burial ritual. No one heard any screams; nothing was stolen. Decades passed, and her case remained unsolved. Unsolved, that is, until yesterday.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“Is it ever justifiable, I wondered, to trap someone in a story that robs them of their truth, but voices someone else's?”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“I said that it was amazing to me that a group of anthropologists wouldn’t recognize the biases that they were perpetuating themselves. She laughed at me: “Of course they recognize them! But they wanted to perpetuate them.” “Why?” “Because it solidified their positions of power.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“And yet, there will always be something essentially elsewhere about New York. It is a place that people come to precisely because it doesn't ever fully offer itself. It's intoxicating. Keeps you on your toes. Keeps you drinking coffee and keeps you walking.”
― Becky Cooper, Mapping Manhattan: A Love (and Sometimes Hate) Story in Maps by 75 New Yorkers

“Jane was known for her morbid humor and for her disappearing spells––the kind of girl to blurt out in the middle of a perfectly happy get-together, “Christ, the only reason I get up in the morning is because I hope a truck will run over me.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“I know even less about whether telling a responsible story of the past is possible, having learned all too well how the act of interpretation molds the facts in service of the storyteller. I have been burned enough times to know: There are no true stories; there are only facts, and the stories we tell ourselves about those facts.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“...Jane’s story functioned as a kind of cautionary tale, then perhaps it was less about the literal truth of what happened to Jane than it was an allegory about the dangers that faced women in academia.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“In our eagerness to find answers and simple through-lines, we overlook complexity, ignoring facts that don’t fit. The danger is that we are even more ignorant of our blindness when the narratives come with the gloss of science.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“Back then, I was blind to the idea that an institution could still be destructive even if its members were good people.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“At nearly seventy-five, he was barely diminished by age.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“We had come a long way from the pre-'Feminine Mystique' days, but the model I'd inherited of being a strong, independent woman left no space for needing to be loved. And as I tried to own this power, I discovered, as perhaps Jane did, that this trailblazing did nothing to supplant the need for companionship. In fact, it only made the search harder, and the need greater.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“I said that it was amazing to me that a group of anthropologists wouldn’t recognize the biases that they were perpetuating themselves.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“I knew the clubs were elitist, I knew they created a problematic power dynamic, and I knew that many of my best friends had never stepped inside, and yet, I was never so critical of them that I stopped going. I had even joined one of the few all-women ones, telling myself that there was no damage done if its very existence helped mitigate the power imbalance. I saw now that it was a privilege not to be forced to examine the issue more critically, and that no matter how much I thought I stood apart from them, my hands were not clean of having perpetuated the structural problems they reinforced.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“An institution can still be destructive even if its members are good people.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“The colonial aspect is still very much with us,” Karl continued, bringing us up to the present. His enunciation underlined his words: These rich nations—England, France, Germany—went in and plundered other nations, collecting their past and controlling it, by being the ones to interpret it, to give it significance and meaning. “Archaeology is the handmaiden of colonialism.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“the way we relate to our dead is the oldest mark of our humanity.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“He was a quiet person, reserved to the point of brooding, whose face wasn’t expressive even at the best of times.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“My freshmen seminar professor had warned our class that Harvard was an institution on a scale we could not imagine: "Harvard will change you by the end of your four years, but don't expect to change it." It wouldn't be surprising if an institution that prided itself on being older than the US government might have behaved as though it were accountable only to itself.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“...she did not need a man to feel complete, but she could still long to be loved. It was a fragile stance that put independence at odds with itself.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence

“The culture of true-crime fandom felt like it flattened crime into entertainment, using other people’s fear and trauma to deal with a sense of bodily vulnerability. I understood the power that comes from bringing yourself to the edge of what you’re most afraid of, but I worried that inhaling stories about death at that clip required a detachment from the people who were killed and the families that were grieving. There’s a responsibility to the dead as well as the living.”
― Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half Century of Silence