Mental illness and insanity

Quote

Chapter

"There’s got to be something wrong with somebody who’d do a thing like that."

2

“She’d fill a tub with ice-cold water, put [Perry] in it, and hold me under till I was blue.”

2

“In some ways, old Perry was "spooky as hell." Take for example, that temper of his. He could slide into a fury "quicker than ten drunk Indians. And yet, you wouldn’t know it. "He might be ready to kill you, but you’d never know it, not to look at or listen to.”

2

“Look at his family!... His mother, an alcoholic, had strangled on her own vomit... Fern, the other daughter, had jumped out of a window... [and] Jimmy, who had one day driven his wife to suicide and killed himself the next.”

2

Floyd “never for a minute believed [Dick] meant to carry it out.”

3

“Concussed his head in a car smash-up. After that, he wasn’t the same boy. Gambling, writing bad checks, I never knew him to do them things before.”

3

“The murderous potential can become activated, especially if some disequilibrium is already present, when the victim-to-be is unconsciously perceived as a key figure in some past traumatic configuration.”

4