“As I made my way out of the apartment and got in my patrol car I realized that it wasn't too late to stop myself from getting hardened and losing my sense of compassion. It dawned on me that it had been almost two years--almost to the very day--that I had been sworn in as a police officer. And over the last two years, I had seen lots of situations, many of them with tragic outcomes. I had been made completely aware of the degrees to which people would go to get revenge, to get high, to get laid, to get off easy and to get away with something--even to the point of telling outrageous lies about my own conduct.”

“It had been a little over a year since the last murder; moreover it had been a year since I had run as quickly as legally possible from whom I had been. It had taken almost that long to become a legal adult, get the money straightened out and get my name changed. Who was Abigail? Who was Vera? I felt as though I was neither person. I felt like I wasn’t a person at all anymore.”

“If I get pulled over on the short drive between here and my house I'll have to say, "I had only two beers in two hours, officer, but then I made out with a lumberjack. You know how it is.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

“As I was escorted outside by the officers, my friends looked back at me with blank expressions. I don’t think they knew what to say to me. I had lied to them about my home life. They had always been there for me and probably would have understood if I had told them the truth from the start, but it was too late. All the lies I had told them about having a perfect family had been shattered by that one incident.”

“I had been fed, in my youth, a lot of old wives' tales about the way men would instantly forsake a beautiful woman to flock around a brilliant one. It is but fair to say that, after getting out in the world, I had never seen this happen."[From a column dated November 17, 1928]”