Gavin de Becker writes: After one speech, a policeman who’d been in the audience asked to talk with me alone. He told me how he realized just then that he had relentlessly pursued a female student at the police academy when he was on the staff there. She said no to him for eighteen months, all the while concerned that the rejection would have an impact on her career. “She gave me no indication that she wanted a relationship with me, but I never let up, not for a moment,” he said. “It paid off, though. We got married.” (p. 195)
* But the howls for glory of assassins had been unanswered in their mundane pre-attack lives. The assassin might be weird or unusual, but we cannot say we don’t understand his motives, his goal. He wants what Americans want: recognition, and he wants what all people want: significance. People who don’t get that feeling in childhood seek ways to get it in adulthood. It is as if they have been malnourished for a lifetime and seek to fix it with one huge meal. (p. 244).
