Kemper Quotes

[Talking about Monte Rissell] ...and like Ed Kemper he was able to convince the psychiatrist he was making excellent progress while he was actually killing human beings. This is kind of a sick version of the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb. The answer being, just one, but only if the light bulb wants to change.

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o'clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it's all in the balance, it hasn't happened yet, it hasn't even begun yet, it not only hasn't begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it's going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn't need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world's roaring rim.

I do love irony. It’s so…complicated and coincidental.

Money is a servant to politicians and the country. But, if the politicians and the country become the servant of the money, the politicians has failed.

The Foundation of Freedom is Unity

Maybe this was, in fact, the very definition of intimacy: acting with another person the way you did when you were alone.

OVER MY MANY YEARS OF OBSERVING AND INTERACTING WITH SERIAL KILLERS, I’VE found that a large percentage of them are abnormally fixated on their mothers—usually negatively, like Kemper; sometimes positively; or a confused mix of both, like McGowan.

My favorite feature is my red hair. Why wouldn't it be? It sets me apart from other people who don't have red hair, and it instantly bonds me with people who do. Experts often say that redheads are an endangered species - but experts say a lot of things. My own hasty scans of sidewalks and shopping malls show plenty of us out and about. Maybe the experts are just saying that because they are jealous of all the redheads - and the only revenge they know is to claim that we will all die.

All were dissected or decapitated or sexually assaulted after death. He cut leg meat from two of his victims into a macaroni casserole he prepared and ate. Kemper bludgeoned his mother with a hammer as she slept. He sawed off her head, had sex with her corpse, and carved out her larynx and shoved it down the garbage disposal.

SOMETIMES, THINGS DIDN’T NEED TO BE BIGGER, THEY ONLY NEED TO BECOME BETTER.

That's it. New rule: no more flirting during the zombie apocalypse

I’m a threat to anything that hurts Wonderland, including indifference.

You know…it always seems obvious to outsiders when someone is doing something wrong, but when your mind is in the midst of evil, it is easy to be manipulated by crueller instincts.

I’m a sixteen-year-old unlicensed, inexperienced driver with a reanimated corpse blocking my view. Crazy is the only way I can drive.

If I can face a street full of rabid zombies, I can tell a boy I like him. Right?

Thank you, Deke. You are very good to me.” “I know,” he smirks. “Can I get back in your bed now?

S’up?” he asks. My voice rattles when I answer. “N-not much. You know, reanimated corpses chasing me on a cruise ship. Same old.

If they ever turn, let them chase me for a while. It’s always been a fantasy of mine to be chased by zombie cheerleaders.

Officer Kemper is dark, scary and unpredictable. I don’t understand how it’s possible for someone to go from tasing and handcuffing you in order to force sexual acts, to spooning you and bringing you eggs. It was basically breakfast in bed, and now I have a cage on my cock.

It’s all now you see. Yesterday wont be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armstead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed even a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.

Stockpiling serial-killer lore is a rite of passage for guys in their twenties who want to seem dark and edgy. I was precisely the kind of dork who, in my twenties, would do anything to seem dark and edgy. And there I was, all through the flannel nineties, rattling off minutiae about Henry Lee Lucas and Carl Panzram and Edmund Kemper.

You can take that needle out of my leg now. I'd like to pull up my pants.

Das Fundament der Freiheit ist die Einheit

What’s the point of doing what you’re told if you have no choice in the matter?

Done is better than pending

If there is no case to take care of, then you will take care to create a case to take care of. Otherwise your system becomes useless.

Geld ist ein Diener der Politik und des Landes. Wird aber die Politik und das Land zum Diener des Geldes, hat die Politik versagt.

Some people think they can barge in and give you their opinion even though you didn't ask for it.

One of my great hobbies in life is feeling sorry for myself. Nothing makes me feel more alive than when I suspect I have been wronged. Oh, the energy!

At the time of that headshot, I was twenty-three years old, but I looked both fourteen and eighty-seven.

I knew that I needed to quiet my mind; lucky for me, there is no place to quiet your mind like the northernmost edge of Manhattan's Times Square.

Plans, schedules, and structure make me feel secure in a world that - let's just say it - is going straight to hell.

You’ve got a lame hand.' This was the clinical term for my condition. 'I’m not really sure why,' the doctor concluded. I looked at this man and I realized that I, too, could have been a doctor.

I do not understand how you know you only have one life if you have never died, because if you have never died, then you cannot possibly know if you would go on living a second life, or go on living no more lives.

My roommate in college was from Yemen, and whenever anyone said anything nice to her she'd tell them they have beautiful eyes. The idea is whatever beauty you see is actually coming from you rather than the thing itself. Like the beauty is in the perception, not the thing.

What we wanted was not the facts so much as what guys like Kemper were thinking and feeling as they planned and executed their crimes. We wanted to know what motivated them, what techniques they used, and how they regarded each assault or murder afterward. We wanted to know how and where the fantasy began, what the most emotionally satisfying parts of the crime were, and whether torture and the suffering of the victim were important components for them. In other words: What were the distinctions between the “practical” aspects of successfully committing the crime and the “emotional” reasons for doing it.

To murder freedom…well, that’s to murder my time. And no one should have the right to kill anyone else’s time.

Change happens a lot more than you acknowledge...

Chapter 1: The making of the Co-Ed Killer

Edmond Kemper had a horrible temper. He cut off young girls heads and took them home to bed. Edmond

The alienation born of the failure to connect was the worst sort of loneliness there was, much uglier than simply lamenting a person's absence.

Living in a diverse world—or leading a diverse work force—is more than a mental construct, a memorized list of cultural differences, or a willingness to be tolerant. It’s about examining how well we function at the margins and interfaces of life, where divergent ways of being and believing meet and collide. (Kemper

You’re a one-man, ass-kicking retribution machine.” Kemper

Whale music had a weight to it, a ponderous, profound theme. The deeper notes resonated in his tissue and filled him with sweet nostalgia. A stuttering creak swept through—the slow rocking of a porch swing, a patio door caught in a summer draft. Then, the soft groan of settling into freshly laundered sheets for a long, long sleep.

Mess tray in hand, he walked the line. Baked beans, mac and cheese, chicken strips, pickled beets, mushy peas. Comfort food from the freezer or a can. Three weeks since they’d seen any fresh produce. Two weeks since they’d brought in relief staff.

That's one thing that amazes me about society. That is, that you can do damn near anything and nobody's gonna say anything or notice.

But they will not be, primarily because the most salient characteristic of the victim-prone person is the conviction that he or she is watched over and protected by the Sun, the Moon, the Wind Goddess, and St. Christopher; and, in short, that it could never happen to him or to her.

Now that he knew what real heartbreak was, it felt not only cheap but disrespectful to fabricate such emotions, only to resolve them a mere hour or so later. - The Decent Proposal

That Guy," she warned him, "is a real weirdo. And you're taking a chance leaving him with your parents. You might be surprised to wake up some morning to learn they have been killed.

Kemper?

Something about the movies lets you forget where you are and go into a whole different world. You just float, and time goes by without you hardly even knowing it. You forget. I forget about the boy and the girl next to us. I forget about Uncle Leone’s shooting and Bobby Kennedy’s killing. I forget about Kemper and his plan to flood our valley. I even forget about the war. Just for a while.

Kemper astutely explains how the highly integrated music industry created, developed, and eventually abandoned the Monkees." -- Library Journal "A keenly incisive---and, at times, refreshingly objective and even-handed---analysis of the entertainment machinery of the era, and the manner in which radio, television, and other areas worked together to manufacture The Monkees seemingly out of thin air." -- Musoscribe "I spent the entire summer of 1987 on the road opening up for The Monkees, and I didn't learn 1% as much about them as I learned from this thorough and remarkable book by Tom Kemper." -- "Weird Al" Yankovic "The Monkees gets into the vast machinery that goes on behind the scenes of producing perfect pop - still relevant today even if the names and corporations have changed - and does it with a lot of fun." -- Chris Shiflett, Foo Fighters "Kemper's book clarifies so much that is misunderstood in the Monkees story." -- Susanna Hoffs, The Bangles "A knowledgeable and incisive portrait of the popular music industry." -- Paul Hirsch, Northwestern University "Fascinating and witty . . .The book is full of interesting insights . . . [and] Kemper is impressive in unpacking particular songs . . . a fresh and engaging take on an oft-told story." ― Shindig! " Valuable, interesting, well-argued, and built on a pile of documented evidence. " - Psychobabble "Belittled at the time of their creation in the mid-Sixties, as made-for-TV Help-era Beatles clones, The Monkees' music has stood the test of time, and then some. Tom Kemper suggests, in his excellent book, that the initial snobbery surrounding the group, at least in elevated critical circles, came about because of the rise of a new rock culture based on authenticity, individual expression and idealism." - Pick of the Week, Choice "Kemper helps us understand what it is that continues to make the Monkees phenomenon 'compelling, fascinating and divisive." - The Spectator

I owe it to the fake Kemper, who I’m now accepting in my mind as a sort of Tyler Durden-type imaginary friend. If Edward Norton can pull it off in Fight Club, then it’s a good enough rationalization for me. Plus, his was Brad Pitt, so ya know. Pretty awesome. But I’d take Officer Kemper over Brad any day. Sorry not sorry.

His new reading also included Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, about a fascistic demagogue who gets elected president on a platform of fear, resentment, nationalism, and a promise to make America great again. “A

This was Grew’s usual practical plea not to kill off the good for the sake of the perfect.

Sometimes it’s just about feeling comfortable in your own pants.

Japanese paranoia stemmed partly from xenophobia rooted in racism. This combination wasn’t peculiar to Japan, as the Nazis were demonstrating in Germany. In the United States, the 1924 Exclusion Act remained in force, prohibiting all immigration from Asia. Some Western states didn’t think the Exclusion Act went far enough, because it hadn’t gotten rid of the Japanese who had immigrated before the United States slammed the door. Xenophobes argued that these immigrants were now breeding more Japanese, who were recognized, outrageously, as American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Farmers in California and Arizona were especially hostile. Even before the Exclusion Act, these states had passed Alien Land Laws severely restricting the property rights of Japanese. Then in 1934 a group of farmers in Arizona’s Salt River Valley began agitating to kick Japanese farmers out, alleging that they had flooded into the region and were depriving farmland from deserving whites who were already hurting from the Depression. They also demanded that white landowners stop leasing acreage to Japanese farmers. The white farmers and their supporters held rallies and parades, blaring their message of exclusion. In the fall of that year, night riders began a campaign of terrorism. They dynamited irrigation canals used by Japanese farmers and threw dynamite bombs at their homes and barns. The leaders of the Japanese community tried to point out that only 700 Japanese lived in the valley and most had been there for more than twenty years. Three hundred fifty of them were American citizens, and only 125 worked in agriculture, mostly for American farmers. Facts made no impression on the white farmers’ racist resentments. Some local officials exploited the bigotry for political gain. The Japanese government protested all this. Hull didn’t want a few farmers to cause an international incident and pushed the governor of Arizona to fix the problem. The governor blamed the terrorism on communist agitators. Dynamite bombs continued to explode on Japanese farms through the fall of 1934. The local and state police maintained a perfect record—not a single arrest. In early February 1935 the Arizona legislature began considering a bill that would forbid Japanese immigrants from owning or leasing land. If they managed to grow anything, it could be confiscated. Any white farmer who leased to a Japanese would be abetting a crime. (Japan had similar laws against foreigners owning farmland.) American leaders and newspapers quickly condemned the proposed law as shameful, but farmers in Arizona remained enthusiastic. Japanese papers covered the controversy as well. One fascist group, wearing uniforms featuring skulls and waving a big skull flag, protested several times at the US embassy in Tokyo. Patriotic societies began pressuring Hirota to stand up for Japan’s honor. He and Japan’s representatives in Washington asked the American government to do something. Arizona politicians got word that if the bill passed, millions of dollars in New Deal money might go elsewhere. Nevertheless, on March 19 the Arizona senate passed the bill. On March 21 the state house of representatives, inspired more by fears of evaporating federal aid than by racial tolerance, let the bill die. The incident left a bad taste all around.

My best friend and I used to play a game sometimes...we'd divide everyone we knew into two categories based on the way they related to a single qualifying factor. It was a way to make sweeping generalizations that were wildly inaccurate, but invariably amusing to pronounce. For instance, people fall into two categories, those who listen to music to 'put' them in a certain mood, and those who listen to music because they're already 'in' a certain mood.

Executing Ted Bundy cost the state of Florida seven or eight million dollars, money that could have been better invested in building a criminal forensic institution devoted to the research and study of people like Bundy, Kemper, Gacy, Berkowitz and Dahmer, who have hideously violated society’s trust. Criminologists have long ago agreed that the death penalty has never deterred violent criminals. It only satisfies the families of the victims and the general desire of society for revenge.

Like Sally Hawkins with the creature of water, I seemed to have developed a crush on something that wasn't exactly a person, but was definitely smarter than a fish.

There is no greater punishment than shame', I recalled from either an old Buddhist text or something my high school indoor soccer coach said once.

Have you ever noticed that when God closes a door, he opens a window? Neither have I. But I have noticed that timing and luck sometimes line up in such a way that you can catch a break.

HAVE GUN, WILL TRAVEL, western adventure. BROADCAST HISTORY: (Originated on TV: Sept. 14, 1957–Sept. 21, 1963, CBS.) Radio: Nov. 23, 1958–Nov. 27, 1960, CBS. 30m, Sundays at 6. Multiple sponsorship. CAST: John Dehner as Paladin, soldier of fortune, western knight errant, gunfighter. Ben Wright as Heyboy, the Oriental who worked at the Carlton Hotel in San Francisco, where Paladin lived. Virginia Gregg as Missy Wong, Heyboy’s girlfriend. Virginia Gregg also in many leading dramatic roles. Supporting players from Hollywood’s Radio Row, most of the same personnel listed for Gunsmoke. ANNOUNCER: Hugh Douglas. PRODUCER-DIRECTOR: Frank Paris. CREATORS-WRITERS: Herb Meadow and Sam Rolfe. WRITERS: Gene Roddenberry, John Dawson, Marian Clark, etc. SOUND EFFECTS: Ray Kemper, Tom Hanley. Have Gun, Will Travel was an oddity: the only significant radio show that originated on television. Beginning as a TV series for Richard Boone, Have Gun leaped immediately into the top ten and gained such an enthusiastic following that CBS decided to add it to the fading radio chain.

The point is, sometimes it's good to be in charge. But also, sometimes it's less stressful not to have to do all that work.

... Being a Mom is hard, but trying to remain rational while hungry is even harder.

Dollars to donuts you’re looking at ODs there,” said Kemper, pointing to some young people getting out of cars and heading to one of the gravesites. “Over eighty thousand people in America this year alone,” she added. “More than died in Vietnam and the wars in the Middle East combined. And far more than die in traffic accidents or by guns, and it’s only getting worse. Next year we’ll probably be looking at over a hundred thousand dead. The opioid crisis is actually responsible for the life expectancy in this country starting to go down. Can you wrap your head around that? Nearly a half million dead since 2000. Drug overdoses are the leading cause of death for Americans under age fifty. We had a recent study done at DEA. Life insurance companies value a human life at about five million bucks. Using that number and other factors, our people projected the economic loss to the country each year due to the opioid crisis at about a hundred billion dollars. A third of the population is on medication for pain. And they’re not getting addicted on street corners. They’re getting addicted at their doctors’ offices.” “From prescription painkillers.

I knew that you catch more flies with honey, and so I was ready to be a one-woman army of bees.

Our answers were rarely found in confessional sessions in a jailhouse interrogation room despite how hard serial killers like Ted Bundy and Edmund Kemper tried to play their interviewers. Our answers were far more likely to be found at the morgue, or on a coroner’s examining table, or in those grisly crime photos that were my office décor for half a decade. And, yes, there is a price to be paid for that knowledge.

No one likes to talk about this too much because it’s boring, and depressing, but working closely with such people has taught me that hard work is a necessary—though by no means sufficient—element of success. There are plenty of people who work their tails off and don’t achieve their dreams, but among those who do, hard work is always a component.

One of the few happy outcomes of the so-called Digital Revolution is that no one is expected to answer their phone anymore.

Dorothy’s house was in Sacobago, an upscale suburb of Portland. (That’s Sock-o-BAGE-oh, with a hard g, emphasis on the third syllable. Wouldn’t want you mispronouncing our setting the whole way through like I would have—mispronunciation being a common hazard among avid readers as opposed to avid talkers. I still haven’t gotten over the fact that “vague” is one syllable and “chaos” is two.)

My third-grade teacher, Mrs. Carney, used to say the best punishment for bad-tempered people was being stuck with themselves,

The truth is that spending time with highly successful people is exciting but it’s also exhausting, and for the same reason. There’s just so much stimulation, so many expectations placed on every little interaction. Also, it’s hard to feel smart when you’re not the one defining the terms—when you’ve been relegated to the sidekick role. There’s a reason Watson and Hastings come across as idiots, and Miss Marple tends to work alone.

I’ve always preferred the silence of winter to the cacophony of summer—not because it’s a perfect silence, but because it makes you that much more aware of whatever sounds intrude upon it: the delicate crunch of footsteps, the odd chirp from small birds hopping along the naked branches above, the scamper of what I hoped were just squirrels and chipmunks on the forest floor.