I Am Not a Serial Killer
Dan Wells
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I've been clinically diagnosed with sociopathy,' I said. 'Do you know what that means?' 'It means you're a freak,' he said. 'It means that you're about as important to me as a cardboard box,' I said. 'You're just a thing - a piece of garbage that no one's thrown away yet. Is that what you want me to say?' 'Shut up,' said Rob. He was still acting tough, but I could see his bluster was starting to fail. He didn't know what to say. 'The thing about boxes,' I said, 'is that you can open them up. Even though they're completely boring on the outside, there might be something interesting inside. So while you're saying all of these stupid, boring things I'm imagining what it would be like to cut you open and see what you've got in there.”
“In my biology class, we'd talked about the definition of life: to be classified as a living creature, a thing needs to eat, breathe, reproduce, and grow. Dogs do, rocks don't, trees do, plastic doesn't. Fire, by that definition, is vibrantly alive. It eats everything from wood to flesh, excreting the waste as ash, and it breathes air just like a human, taking in oxygen and emitting carbon. Fire grows, and as it spreads, it creates new fires that spread out and make new fires of their own. Fire drinks gasoline and excretes cinders, it fights for territory, it loves and hates. Sometimes when I watch people trudging through their daily routines, I think that fire is more alive than we are–brighter, hotter, more sure of itself and where it wants to go. Fire doesn't settle; fire doesn't tolerate; fire doesn't 'get by.' Fire does. Fire is.”
“APD is primarily defined as a lack of empathy,' I said. I'd looked it up too, a few months ago. Empathy is what allows people to interpret emotion, the same way ears interpret sounds; without it you become emotionally deaf. 'It means I don't connect emotionally with other people. I wondered if he was going to pick that one.' 'How do you even know that?' she said. 'You're fifteen years old, for goodness' sake. You should be ... I don't know, chasing girls or playing video games.' 'You're telling a sociopath to chase girls?”
“Fear is a ... it's a weird thing, when you think about it. People are only afraid of other things, they're never afraid of themselves.”
“It doesn’t matter what other people think when you’re right - John Cleaver”
“I'm a good person," I said, "because I know what good people are supposed to act like, and I copy them.”
“Fear is about things that you can't control. The future or the dark, or someone trying to kill you. You don't get scared of yourself because you always know what you're going to do.”
“I used to have a list of people I was going to kill one day. It was against my rules now, but sometimes I really missed that list.”
“Sow a thought and reap an action, sow an action and reap a habit, sow a habit and reap a destiny - John Cleaver”
“The monster behind the wall stirred. I'd come to think of it as a monster, but it was just me. Or the darker part of me, at least. You probably think it would be creepy to have a real monster hiding inside of you, but trust me - it's far, far worse when the monster is really just your own mind. Calling it a monster seemed to distance it a little, which made me feel better about it. Not much better, but I take what I can get.”
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Book Keywords:
john-cleaver, humor, fiction, pyro, box, fire, dark-humor, sociopath, pyromaniac, rob, john-weaver, pyromania, chasing
