“The goal with hostages is to gradually lower expectations; in nonhostage crises, it's to lower emotions.”

“Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months."I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," [the computer game he played day and night] he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings.”

“from the Basement tapes Eric outdid Dylan with the apologies. To the untrained eye, he seemed sincere. The psychologists on the case found Eric less convincing. They saw a psychopath. Classic. He even pulled the stunt of self-diagnosing to dismiss it. "I wish I was a fucking sociopath so I didn't have any remorse," Eric said. "But I do."Watching that made Dr. Fuselier angry. Remorse meant a deep desire to correct a mistake. Eric hadn't done it yet. He excused his actions several times on the tapes. Fuselier was tough to rattle, but that got to him."Those are the most worthless apologies I've ever heard in my life," he said. It got more ludicrous later, when Eric willed some of his stuff to two buddies, "if you guys live.""If you live?" Fuselier repeated. "They are going to go in there and quite possibly kill their friends. If they were the least bit sorry they would not do it!”

“Eric dreamed big but settled for reality.”

“Prom was more about acting out some weird facsimile of adulthood: dress up like a tacky wedding party, hold hands and behave like a couple even if you've never dated, and observe the etiquette of Gilded Age debutantes thrust into modern celebrity: limos, red carpets and a constant stream of paparazzi, played by parents, teachers, and hired photo hacks.”

“You can't really teach a kid anything: you can only show him the way and motivate him to learn it himself.”

“When I fell out the window, I knew somebody would catch me. That's what I need to tell you: that I knew the loving world was there all the time. -Patrick Ireland of the Columbine massacre”