(Introduction) ...We started talking about The Executioner‘s Song and it became clear, from his argument, that he believed the closer he stuck to the facts of Gilmore‘s story, the more fictional it became. Then he hit on something that I think is pretty important, if one is to enter into the spirit of the book. ‘The feeling I had with The Executioner‘s Song,‘ he said, ‘was that these facts, if very closely examined and reexamined and reduced and refined, would begin to create a manifest of the give that I would call fictional. Fictional because it breathed, and there‘s the difference. If you put facts together in such a way that they truly breathe for the reader, then you‘re writing fiction.‘ - P-1
54p. ..It was seven miles and more from Vern‘s home in Provo to the shop in Lindon, seven miles along State Street with all the one-story buildings. The first morning Vern drove him there. After that, Gary left at 6 to be sure of getting to work by 8 A.M. in case he wasn‘t able to find a hitch. Once, after catching a ride right off, he came in at 6:30, an hour and a half early. Other times it was not so fast. Once, a dawn cloudburst came in off the mountains, and he had to walk in the rain. At night he would often trudge home without a ride. It was a lot of traveling to get to a shop that was hardly more than a big shed with nothing to see but trucks and heavy equipment parked all over a muddy yard. - P-1
87p. ...The twilight came down slowly. It was as if you were taking one breath and then another from a cluster of roses. The air was good as marijuana then. - P-1
140p. ...There was one grave that had no flowers. A little boy‘s grave. Gary went around and took a flower from each of a number of other graves and put them in a rusty little vase by the boy‘s headstone. Then they turned on to some good pot. Right away, Gary had to get out of the cemetery. Told Sterling he was seeing himself in a tomb. - P-1
151p. ..Nicole heard about the lunch. There was a piece of him, she decided, that liked to tell crazy stories to grown-ups. It must have gotten locked in at the age of eight. - P-1
202p. ..She said, "Nobody is ever really free, Gary. As long as you live with another human being, you‘re not free." - P-1
312p. ..Yes, Gary was a sad and lonely man, one of the most sad and one of the most lonely. "Oh, God," thought Bessie, "he was in prison so long, he didn‘t know how to work for a living or pay a bill. All the while he should have been learning, he was locked up." - P-1
318p. ..Yes, the memory of one‘s life might be one‘s best and only friend. It was certainly the only touch to soothe those outraged bones that would chafe in the flesh until they were a skeleton free of the flesh. - P-1
346p. ..It came down on Nicole what an expression like "horrible loss" really meant. It was throwing away the most valuable thing in your life. It was knowing you had to live next to something larger than your own life. In this case, it was knowing that Gary was going to die. - P-1
385p. ...The psychopath had fantasies. The psychotic had hallucinations. - P-1
385p. ...They had to recognize, Woods warned, that the law wanted to keep psychopathy and psychosis apart. If the psychopath were ever accepted as legally insane, then crime, judgment, and punishment would be replaced by antisocial act, therapy, and convalescence. - P-1
406p. ...If I feel like murder it doesn‘t necessarily matter who gets murdered. Don‘t you know that about me? Murder is just a thing of itself, a rage and rage is not reason—so why does it matter who vents a rage. That‘s the first time I‘ve consciously acknowledged that insane truth. Perhaps I‘m beginning to grow... grow with me.... - P-1
447p. ..The news lived in the air of the courtroom. It was as if there had been one kind of existence in the room, and now there was another: a man was going to be executed. It was real but it was not comprehensible. The man was standing there. - P-1
482p. ..Campbell believed the prison system was a complete socialist way of life. No wonder Gilmore had gotten into trouble. For twelve years, a prison had told him when to go to bed and when to eat, what to wear and when to get up. It was absolutely diametrically opposed to the capitalist environment. Then one day they put the convict out the front door, told him today is magic, at two o‘clock you are a capitalist. Now, do it on your own. Go out, find a job, get up by yourself, report to work on time, manage your money, do all the things you were taught not to do in prison. Guaranteed to fail. Eighty percent went back to jail.
490p. ..Gary told them of his belief that he had been executed once before, in eighteenth-century England. He said, "I feel I‘ve been here before. There is some crime from my past." He got quiet, and said, "I feel I have to atone for the thing I did then." Esplin couldn‘t help thinking that this stuff about eighteenth-century England would sure have made a difference with the psychiatrists if they had heard it.
494p. ..Now, the walls of the trailer closed in again. Somebody asked her once if it had been difficult to learn to live in the trailer, and she said no, not difficult at all. That was because she had never lived there, but died the day she moved in.
495p. ..Everything was shades of brown. One poverty after another. Even the icebox was brown. It was that shade of gloom which would not lift. The color of clay. Nothing could grow.
499p. ...The violence of Portland licked right up to the edge of the store and left a spew like that yellow foam on city beaches where old rubber dries out with jellyfish and whiskey bottles and the dead squid.
526p. ..Dennis wasn‘t hearing ideas that were new to him, hell, by comparison to most, he was pretty cultivated in these matters even if, by his own measure, a dilettante. Still he was conversant, and so was impressed that Gilmore was actually this familiar with the consciousness stuff. While, essentially, Gary had nothing new to contribute, still he had done a good deal of thinking on the subject. "You cannot escape yourself," Gilmore said. "You have to meet yourself."
527p. .."Judas," said Gary, "was the most bum-beefed man in history." ..Judas knew what was going down, Gilmore said. Judas was there to help Jesus tune into the prophecy.
600p. ...He had learned one lesson he would never erase, and thought of it again on the night he dined with the Judges. The secret of people who had class was that they remained accurate to the facts. Schiller called it history. You recorded history right. If you did the work that way, you could end up a man of substance.
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