Tess Gerritsen

I know there’s evil in the world, and there always has been. But you don’t need to believe in Satan or demons to explain it. Human beings are perfectly capable of evil all by themselves.

Only the forgotten are truly dead.

The heart makes its choices without weighing the consequences. It doesn't look ahead to the lonely nights that follow.

The dead do not hurt you; only the living do.

Evil doesn't die. It never dies. It just takes on a new face, a new name. Just because we've been touched by it once, it doesn't mean we're immune to ever being hurt again. Lightning can strike twice.

Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.

Everything's a gamble, love most of all.

You don't have to die to go to hell.

The most intimate feeling people can share is neither love nor hate, but pain.

Susan Juby

In the future if my mother tries to shame me with her disapproval, I will let her know in no uncertain terms that I reject her and all of her codependent baggage. I am Codependent No More.

If the facts don't fit your theory, just find some new facts.

My heart kind of hurt when I looked at her. Not because I was in love, but because I could tell from looking at her that she didn't hate herself. Not only didn't she seem to hate herself, she barely seemed to think about herself. How fucking glorious must that be?

Maybe careers aren’t something you can really plan for. They just sort of happen, like brown eyes or flat feet. I took one of those career aptitude tests last year, and it showed that I should be a flight attendant or a seamstress. Not a fashion designer or anything, mind you, but a sweatshop worker. Apparently stewardesses and sweatshop workers and I enjoy a lot of the same interests and activities.

I think we learn the truth about ourselves by telling it to someone else.

If you are alive and conscious, you are probably codependent.

Blaize Clement

They say God never gives us more than we can handle, but sometimes I think God has overestimated what I can take.

Protecting people from the truth is another way of shutting them out.

Perfume companies ought to bottle the smell of crisp bacon. Forget pheromones. I’ll bet a woman with a little spot of bacon grease behind her ears would attract every male within a five-mile radius.

Being young is easy, you know, but it takes guts to be old

She remembered the day that she first realized she would never be able to read every book in the world," said John Clement. "She cried for days."

I told him, 'You can start in the middle and kiss your way thirty-six inches to the right, and then you can go back to the middle and kiss your way thirty-six inches to the left. You can just kiss my big ass.

Heads of warring nations could learn a lot about how to achieve lasting peace by watching dogs and cats who live in the same house.

Megan Abbott

There's something dangerous about the boredom of teenage girls.

Ages fourteen to eighteen, a girl needs something to kill all that time, that endless itchy waiting, every hour, every day for something — anything — to begin.

That’s what people never understand: They see us hard little pretty things, brightly lacquered and sequin-studded, and they laugh, they mock, they arouse themselves. They miss everything. You see, these glitters and sparkle dusts and magicks? It’s war paint, it’s feather and claws, it’s blood sacrifice.

If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.

The more I did it―the more it owned me. It made things matter. It put a spine into my spineless life and that spine spread, into backbone, ribs, collarbone, neck held high.
It was something. Don't say it wasn't.

People will always try to scare you into things. Scare you away from things. Scare you into not wanting things you can't help wanting. You can't be afraid.

Jo Nesbø

Losing your life is not the worst thing that can happen. The worst thing is to lose your reason for living.

Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet and it comes creeping back again and again and in the end it inherits the world.

Doubt is faith's shadow.

What is worse? Taking the life of a person who wants to live or taking death from a person who wants to die.

Everything you do leaves traces, doesn’t it. The life you’ve lived is written all over you, for those who can read.

There’s only one thing worse than not satisfying a desire. And that is not to feel any desire.

To have the chance of being loved we have to take a chance on being destroyed inside.

I have problems with a religion which says that faith in itself is enough for a ticket to heaven. In other words, that the ideal is your ability to manipulate your own common sense to accept something your intellect rejects. It's the same model of intellectual submission that dictatorships have used throughout time, the concept of a higher reasoning without any obligation to discharge the burden of proof.

Charlie Huston

One day, when I am a braver man, I will tell her these things, and then I will look her in the eye tell her I love her and ask her to be only mine. But until that day, we're just friends.

Things are as bad as you fear they are. People are as bad as you think they are. The Universe does not care.

Women. You tell me they're not all witches, and I'll tell you you haven't been paying attention.

For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to questions one's own abilities and judgement, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.

Once we understand how they think, we can predict their behaviour. And once we predict it well, we can manipulate it. That is diplomacy.

That's what happens when you get a regular job, other people's shit becomes your problem. 'Course, by the time you got that figured, it's up around your ears and you're just trying to keep your [expletive]ing mouth shut.

I feel like I'm forgetting something. Vyrus. Clans. Zombies. Stay out of the sun. Don't get shot. Abandon your life. Drink blood to survive. No, guess that pretty much covers it.

Sara Paretsky

The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective, ..... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.

When you're struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.

A god who cares more about a little water on the head than my daughter's character is not a deity I want her to spend eternity with.

Some men can only admire independent women at a distance.

Catherine O'Flynn

He was glad some of the pain was fading, had already faded so much since the first year. But it seemed more to be a trade off: with the pain went details and memories. People had said, ‘Time heals,’ but he realized time didn’t heal, time just eroded and confused, and he didn’t think that was the same thing at all.

I don’t know – I suppose if you’re very unhappy at home, anywhere is better than there.

Our absence is what remains of us.

She found the evenings long and empty, and the nights worse. She dreaded the weekends.

She realized that was one of the things she liked about Green Oaks – nobody knew her. She wasn’t the quiet girl from class. She wasn’t the girl with no mom or dad.

I hate it here. I hate the way everyone looks at you. I hate the way everyone looks.

Robert Goddard

Photographs don’t discriminate between the living and the dead. In the fragments of time and shards of light that compose them, everyone is equal. Now you see us; now you don’t. It doesn’t matter whether you look through a camera lens and press the shutter. It doesn’t even matter whether you open your eyes or close them. The pictures are always there. And so are the people in them.

But perhaps revelation often comes when you’re not looking for it, resolution when you don’t realize you need it.

In a world that thought itself so wise yet behaved so stupidly, it was possible sometimes to believe that only the mad saw matters as they truly were, that only people like my brother were prepared to admit what they saw from the corner of their eye.

History is the geology of human experience, a study, as it were, of tragedy and comedy laid down in the strata of past lives. In death there are no winners or losers, merely people who once lived but can never live again. What they thought, what they believed, what they hoped, is largely lost. That which remains is history.

Timothy Hallinan

Life is a gift. If we don't live it well, we are being ungrateful. And we have to love the ones who journey with us.

She gave me the slow nod women use to indicate that they understand our pain, they admire the courage with which we handle it, and they're absolutely certain that it's all our fault.

And you know women, they're both back there turning it into the crime of the century. Planting it in a little garden in the center of their hearts and watering it with feelings. Talking about it, sharing it. You're a cheat, you're a heartbreaker, you're like a museum exhibit, Everything That's Wrong with Guys.

Ain't never gone to be no asshole shortage. We got oil shortages, grain shortages, coal shortages, every kind of fuckin’ shortage you can think of, but there ain't no asshole shortage. Assholism is a dominant trait.

She drove as though a fortune-teller had warned her about the day.

The chuckle is a perfectly acceptable form of laughter.

I'd learned early that fatness in a book wasn't a warning sign, but rather a promise that you would be allowed to remain in its world for a longer time.