Top 40 Caleb Carr Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “It is the greatest truth of our age: Information is not knowledge.”

— Caleb Carr

2. “People would rather be deceived than have the truth cause them anxiety.”

— Caleb Carr

3. “I’m a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don’t get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you’re writing about, rather than into the world you’re in.”

— Caleb Carr

4. “Every human being must find his own way to cope with severe loss, and the only job of a true friend is to facilitate whatever method he chooses.”

— Caleb Carr

5. “The Career and Death of the Mad Thief and Murderer, Samuel Green.”

— Caleb Carr

6. “She has that quality, does the Hudson, as I imagine all great rivers do: the deep, abiding sense that those activities what take place on shore among human beings are of the moment, passing, and aren’t the stories by way of which the greater tale of this planet will, in the end, be told.”

— Caleb Carr

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

7. “I have a grim outlook on the world, and in particular on humanity. Spent years denying it, but I am very misanthropic. And I live alone on a mountain for a reason.”

— Caleb Carr

8. “The defenders of decent society and the disciples of degeneracy are often the same people.”

— Caleb Carr

9. “I, like most of my friends, couldn’t believe I bought a mountain called Misery Mountain, because it was so appropriate.”

— Caleb Carr

10. “Absolutely nothing brings out the killer instinct in the upper crust of New York Society like a charity function.”

— Caleb Carr

11. “Change isn’t something that most people enjoy, even if it’s progressive change.”

— Caleb Carr

12. “The hateful relationship between Japheth Dury and his mother must, we reasoned, have spilled over into self-hatred, as well – for how could any boy despised by his mother fail to question his own worth?”

— Caleb Carr

13. “How does the world look, I often found myself wondering, to a young man whose father is his enemy?”

— Caleb Carr

14. “Yet the profound irony was that our killer believed he was providing himself with just those things: vengeance for the child he had been, protection for the tortured soul he had become.”

— Caleb Carr

15. “I’d seen this happen several times before, in different institutions, but it was no less remarkable on each occasion: the words were like the flow of water over coals, taking away crackling heat and leaving only a steaming whisper, a perhaps momentary but nonetheless effective remission from deep-burning fire.”

— Caleb Carr

16. “Still, it’s an interesting technique-leaving one person behind in order to find her or him somewhere else. And in someone else.”

— Caleb Carr

17. “We are not obligated to provide everyone who comes to this country with a good life,” Morgan went on. “We are obligated to provide them with a chance to attain that life, through discipline and hard work. That chance is more than they have anywhere else. That is why they keep coming.”

— Caleb Carr

18. “So if it seems that some of what I’ll have to say in the pages to come doesn’t reflect the mellowing of age, that’s only because I’ve never found that life and memories respond to time the way that tobacco does.”

— Caleb Carr

19. “I have to be very careful, however, because I have no intention of providing an excuse for this behavior. It’s an attempt to explain how so many women come from backgrounds where the pressure to be a good mother is so severe that if they can’t do it, something really snaps.”

— Caleb Carr

20. “People are disturbed enough by serial killers, but the whole notion of female violence, particularly maternal violence – the idea of mothers who kill – really unnerves people.”

— Caleb Carr

21. “It is never easier to understand the mind of a bomb-wielding anarchist than when standing amid a crush of those ladies and gentlemen who have the money and temerity to style themselves “New York Society.”

— Caleb Carr

22. “I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.”

— Caleb Carr

23. “The definition of terrorism is killing civilians with the intent of changing their political affiliation.”

— Caleb Carr

24. “It didn’t make any more sense to me then than it does now, how life can pile troubles up on a man what don’t deserve them, while letting some of the biggest jackasses and scoundrels alive waltz their way through long, untroubled existences.”

— Caleb Carr

25. “P252 Habit dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again.”

— Caleb Carr

26. “If you’re gonna catch criminals, you got to be a bit of one yourself.”

— Caleb Carr

27. “I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I’m just trying to understand where it came from.”

— Caleb Carr

28. “He’s a journalist. They come in two varieties, cynics and liars.”

— Caleb Carr

29. “There are certain things a man cannot control.”

— Caleb Carr

30. “I fear that in New York State, the electrical chair is increasingly usurping the gallows, Mr. Wolff,” he said evenly. “Although I suspect that, based on your answers to my questions, you will find that out for yourself. God have mercy on you, sir.”

— Caleb Carr

31. “There’s plenty of stories that need telling what never get told, just because people can’t bear the listening.”

— Caleb Carr

32. “The country that manufactures nothing, ran the old saying in such towns, eventually becomes nothing;.”

— Caleb Carr

33. “Whatever poor team of maidservants had to stuff her into the kind of tight-waisted gown she was wearing that evening earned their pay as sure as any coal miner, that much was certain. The.”

— Caleb Carr

34. “Precisely – the bodies were a mirror image of some savage set of experiences that were central to the evolution of our man’s mind.”

— Caleb Carr

35. “Inevitably, I became distracted by tales that I knew held no promise for us – accounts of murders that had long since been solved, or whose salient characteristics were nothing like those of our case – but which were so morbidly fascinating on their own merits that I had to see how they turned out.”

— Caleb Carr

36. “I had never been able when there to fully elude the awareness that I was surrounded by thieves and killers, each of whom had a very good explanation for his or her acts but none of whom gave the impression of being willing to put up with questionable behavior from anyone else ever again.”

— Caleb Carr

37. “P198 Describe John Moore’s brother’s death: but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essentially the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled. Unfortunately, I’d stated this opinion during the funeral, and was nearly forced into an asylum as a result.”

— Caleb Carr

38. “As you walked down the hallway you were likely to be tripped, spat at, cursed, and otherwise maltreated, particularly by those children whose only mental deficiency was that they’d been overindulged, and whose parents clearly could and should have saved themselves the trip to Kreizler’s office.”

— Caleb Carr

39. “A man can be a bachelor, and still be a man – because of his mind, his character, his work. But a woman without children? She’s a spinster, Stevie – and a spinster is always something less than a woman.”

— Caleb Carr

40. “Lawyers like that, as I’ve told you, generally think they have nothing to learn from Jesus Christ himself when it comes to being saviors with a mission. Annoying them is like falling off of a log, really.”

— Caleb Carr

41. “It isn’t really possible for men to understand how much the world doesn’t want women to be complete people. The most important thing a woman can be, in our society – more important, even, than honest or decent – is identifiable.”

— Caleb Carr

42. “We set out on the trail of a murderous monster and ended up face to face with a frightened child.”

— Caleb Carr

43. “The degenerative processes in children have their chief encouragement in the equally defective home surroundings.”

— Caleb Carr

44. “Well, you just catch me where I go wrong,” I shoot back, “but a Harvard education hasn’t done much to get your little manuscript out to the world.”

— Caleb Carr

45. “All of which would have been merely comical, had it not also reflected a very serious reality: most such officials, in their zeal to treat every criminal event as a chance to display supreme control of social order, had forgotten that lawbreakers most often operate quietly and in the shadows, places where men wearing body armor and military helmets not only were out of place, but made the task of investigating the dark deeds that take place in those shadows all the more difficult.”

— Caleb Carr

46. “You know, Mr. Moore, you wouldn’t figure a stinkhole this city to have so many start over it. Seems like the smell’d be enough to drive ’em away...”

— Caleb Carr

47. “John!” my grandmother blared as Harriet nodded in confusion. “Is that you?” “No, Grandmother,” I said, trotting down the thick Persian carpet on the stairs. “It’s Dr. Holmes.”

— Caleb Carr

48. “There were many causes of his unhappiness, but at heart I believe now, as I believed then, that it was essential y the result of growing up in a household, and a world, where emotional expression of any kind was at best frowned on and at worst strangled.”

— Caleb Carr