“There’s got to be something wrong with us. To do what we did,” Perry said.
...“Deal me out, baby,” Dick said. “I’m a normal.” (Page 108). Ironic as readers empathise with Perry rather than Dick.

"The village of Holcomb stands high on the wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansas calls "out there... with its hard blue skies and desert-clear air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West... Holcomb, too, can be seen from great distances. Not that there is much to see -" (pg3)

“Nancy wore her dress of cherry-red velvet, her brother a bright plaid shirt; the parents were more sedately attired, Mr. Clutter in navy-blue flannel, his wife in navy-blue crepe; and—and it was this, especially, that lent the scene an awful aura—the head of each was completely encased in cotton, a swollen cocoon twice the size of an ordinary blown-up balloon, and the cotton, because it had been sprayed with a glossy substance, twinkled like Christmas-tree snow.” - chapter 2

'A hundred miles west and one would be out of the 'Bible Belt', that gospel-haunted strip of American territory in which a man must, if only for business reasons, take his religion with the straightest of faces, but in Finney County one is still within the Bible Belt borders, and therefore a person's church affiliation is the most important factor influencing his class status.' pg. 32

"No because once a thing is set to happen, all you can do is hope it won’t. Or will – depending. As long as you life, there’s always something waiting, and even if it’s bad, and you know it’s bad, what can you do?" (pg.84)

my first thought was Bonnie. Course, it was silly but we didn’t know the facts, and a lot of people thought maybe, on accounts of her own spells - Pg 64.

Foreshadowing: "At the time not a soul in sleeping Holcomb heard them - four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives." Ch.1

Mexico as symbol - escape, of the American Dream of achieving above others, where somneone can be more than equal, where wealth and power can be easily obtained.

...once a thing is set to happen, all you can hope it won't. Or will- depending. As long as you life, theres always something waiting and even if it's bad, and you know it's bad, what can you do? (chapter 2 page 95)

"[Mrs. Johnson] had said she was afraid of Perry, and she was, but was it simply Perry she feared, or was it a configuration of which he was part - the terrible destinies that seemed promised the four children of Florence Buckskin and Tex John Smith?" (Barbara Johnson, pg. 166)
Barbara reflects on the terrible fates of her other two siblings that had befallen a demise to (T.W.) suicide or supposed suicide, and manipulates her ideas of Perry to admit the blame solely on him as some indication of an imposing, outside-of-nature phenomena that only brings harm to their family.

River Valley Farms as analogy of Garden of Eden. Herbet Clutter refers to his farm as such. "an inch more of rain and this country would be paradise - Eden on earth" "''...patch of the paradise, the green, apple-scented Eden.'

Grain solos rise like Greek temples, a symbol of a long-awaited peace, rise to power, of conquering a dry land from the Indians, the British and other oppositional forces. Farmers here are the inheritors, the ministers of divine providence.

''...had a good record in the Army, good as anybody; they gave me the Bronze Star. But I never got promoted. After four years, and fighting through the whole goddam Korean war, I ought at least to have made corporal. But I never did.'' ''I threw a Japanese policeman off a bridge into the water. I was court-martialed for demolishing a Japanese cafe. I was court-martialed again in Kyoto, Japan, for stealing a Japanese taxicab. I was in the army almost four years. I had many violent outbursts of anger while I served time in Japan & Korea. I was in Korea 15 months, was rotated and sent back to the states - and was given special recognition as being the first Korean Vet to come back to the territory of Alaska.''

'"Perry Smith. My God. He's had such a rotten life - ' Parr said, 'Many a man can match sob stories with that little bastard. Me included. Maybe I drink too much, but I sure as hell never killed four people in cold blood.'
'Yeah and how about hanging he bastard? That's pretty god-dam cold-blooded too.'" pg. 280

'...for Perry Smith's life had been no bed of roses but pitiful, an ugly and lonely progress toward one mirage and then another.'

'...worn maps of every state in the Union, every Canadian province, every South American country - for the young man was an incessant conceiver of voyages, not a few of which he had actually taken: to Alaska, to Hawaii and Japan, to Hong Kong.' Perry's maps are symbols of his discontent, of searching for belonging.

'...the parrot appeared, arrived while he slept, a bird 'taller than Jesus, yellow like a sunflower,' a warrior-angel who blinded nuns with its beak, fed upon their eyes, slaughtered them as they 'pleaded for mercy,' then so gently lifted him, enfolded him, winged him away to 'paradise.' Over the years, the bird saves him from '...older children, his father, a faithless girl, a sergeant he'd known in the Army...' After saving him from whatever is causing him harm, there is always an '...Ascension to a paradise...' '...look of unflawed fulfillment, of beatitude, as though at last, and as in one of his dreams, a tall yellow bird had hauled him to heaven.'

After Perry tries to commit suicide by cutting his wrists with a broken light bulb in the Finney County jail, he says, 'The walls of the cell fell away, the sky came down, I saw the big yellow bird....She lifted me...up, up, I could see the Square below...everybody sore as hell because I was free, I was flying, I was better than any of them.'... 'Where is Jesus? Where? '...The bird is Jesus! The bird is Jesus!'

"but afterwards the townspeople, theretoafter sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy re-creating them over and over again... in the glare if which many old neighbours viewed each other strangely, and as strangers." (pg.5)

"(Holcomb, like the rest of Kansas, is 'dry'.) And that, really, is all." (pg4)