Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir ine's blood.

He broke prevailing rules of casual intimacy: He stood too close, stared too hard, touched too much and long. And women adored him for it.

the club had provided for music was a lone pianist who had no idea what kind of piece might accompany such an exotic dance. Bloom thought a moment, hummed a tune, then plinked it out on the keyboard...

Dr. Hervey Cleckley described the prototypical psychopath as a subtly constructed reflex machine which can mimic the human personality perfectly. … So perfect is his reproduction of a whole and...

All were wealthy and at the peaks of their careers, but all also bore the scars of nineteenth-century life, their pasts full of wrecked rail cars, fevers, and the premature deaths of loved ones.

At first alienists describes this condition as moral insanity and those who exhibited the disorder as moral imbeciles. They later adopted the term psychopath.

seemed like jewels on a skull.

She lapsed into "melancholia," a sweet name for depression.

Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?

Among a list of measures effective for inducing vomiting, she included: Injections of tobacco into the anus through a pipe stem.

Holmes explained that he had been doing some dissection but now had completed his research. He offered Chappell thirty-six dollars to cleanse the bones and skull and return to him a fully articulated...

Her place already was luxurious, with a bowling alley where the pins were bottles of chilled champagne

His letter to Rice began, "I have on hand a great project for the World's Fair in Chicago. I am going to build a vertically revolving wheel 250' in dia." Nowhere in this letter, however, did he reveal...

A boutonniere rested beside each plate. Everyone wore tuxedos. There was not a woman in sight.

How easy it was to disappear: A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago.

Ned watched her. She was young and pretty-a "handsome blonde," as he later described her.

would be no skipping and dancing. No heathen. The exposition was a dream city, but it was Burnham's dream. Everywhere

The president of the United States, Benjamin Harrison, attended its grand opening.

In Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days. That

He slashed her throat in a Van Gogh stroke that nearly removed her head from her spine.

In Calumet a thousand ornate streetlamps stood in a swamp, where they did nothing but ignite the fog and summon auras of mosquitoes.

Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien...

Such peaceful intervals never lasted long.

He recognized that the systemic malaise that caused it was a consequence in part of his own refusal over the years to limit his courtship of the finest wines, foods, and cigars.

These were men, wrote Lincoln Steffens, who will not have an office unless it is up where the air is cool and fresh, the outlook broad and beautiful, and where there is silence in the heart of...

banquet of glimpses

It could be done, because it had to be done

I found the actual notes that Prendergast sent to Alfred Trude. I saw how deeply the pencil dug into the paper.

Anyone wishing to bring his own Kodak to the fair had to buy a permit for two dollars

He was a loner and intellectually intolerant.