Laura Lippman

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.

There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.

It's a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.

Tom Franklin

Maybe Larry was wrong about the word friend, maybe he'd been shoved away from everybody for so long all he was was a sponge for the wrongs other people did.

Was that what childhood was? Things rushing by out a window, the trees connected by motion, going too fast for him to notice the consequences?

The seat belt irked his father more than Uncle Colin's not eating meat, because, though his father never said it, Larry knew he considered seat belts cowardly.

Dawn crept up out of the trees, defining a bole, a burl, a leaf at a time the world he'd spent the night trying to comprehend. But what would daylight offer except the illusion of understanding? At least in darkness you were spared the pretending.

Their lives had stopped, frozen, as if in a picture, and the days were nothing more than empty squares on a calendar.

At some point, Alice slipped one arm and then the other into the coat's sleeves, she buttoned its buttons, starting at the top. Silas had followed her, still not seeing what an emblem of defeat, shame, loss, hopelessness, the coat was. With such gaps in his understanding, he saw very clearly how the boy he'd been had grown up to be the man he was.

Harlan Coben

Years fly by, but the heart stays in the same place.

. . . better to have loved and lost" bullshit. Don't show me paradise and then burn it down.

Trust is like that. You can break it for a good reason. But it still remains broken.

Memories, you see, hurt. The good ones most of all.

I remember one time I heard this English professor asking the class what the world's scariest noise is. Is it a man crying out in pain? A woman's scream of terror? A gunshot? A baby crying? And the professor shakes his head and says, 'No, the scariest noise is, you're all alone in your dark house, you know you're all alone, you know that there is no chance anyone else is home or within miles—and then, suddenly, from upstairs, you hear the toilet flush.

The ugliest truth, in the end, was still better than the prettiest of lies.

Man plans. God laughs.

Part of the human condition is that we all think that we are uniquely complex while everyone else is somewhat simpler to read. That is not true, of course. We all have our own dreams and hopes and wants and lust and heartaches. We all have our own brand of crazy.

Hope is cruel. Hope reminds me of what almost was. Hope makes the physical ache return.

Nic Pizzolatto

Certain experiences you can't survive, and afterward you don't fully exist, even if you failed to die.

When it worked, reading could take away the burden of time.

We come here to tell stories so that we can manage the past without being swallowed by it.

I've found that all weak people share a basic obsession - they fixate on the idea of satisfaction. Anywhere you go men and women are like crows drawn by shiny objects. For some folks, the shiny objects are other people, and you'd be better off developing a drug habit.

Some people. Something happens to them. Usually when they're young. And they never get any better.

You’re here because it’s somewhere. Dogs pant in the streets. Beer won’t stay cold. The last new song you liked came out a long, long time ago, and the radio never plays it anymore.

I knew the past wasn't real. It was only an idea, and the thing I'd wanted to touch, to brush against, the feeling I couldn't name - it just didn't exist. It was only an idea, too.

There’s no getting out alive, but you hope to avoid a deadline.

Edward Conlon

On Sunday mornings, as the dawn burned into day, swarms of gulls descended on the uncollected trash, hovering and dropping in the cold clear light.

The bulletproof vest--'bullet resistant,' technically--is made of two double panels of a synthetic material called Kevlar, inside a cloth carrier that holds it around your torso like a lead X-ray smock. One cop wrote phrases from the Bible on his, 'Yea, though I walk in the valley of the Shadow of Death...' Other cops wrote their blood type.

Do you like being a cop?
I love it, when it doesn't suck, sir.

Good cops make their bosses look good, and Hector was a one-man beauty school.

I was constantly amazed by how many people talked me into arresting them.

It wasn't as if crack was getting great press in the South Bronx in 1999, but it took a particular kind of idiot to wake up one day and say, 'Angel dust is a product I've heard nothing but good about, and it's about time I was involved.

When I had to work Shea Stadium for a Mets-Braves game – Atlanta pitcher John Rocker had recently given an interview in which he denounced New Yorkers of all Colors and preferences – I was assigned to a parking lot, where numerous drivers asked me for directions to various highways. When my first answer – “I have no idea” – seemed to invite denunciation and debate, I revised it to “Take the first left.” For all I know, those people are still lost in Queens. 

Tom Piccirilli

The Crone tires quickly and reaches out for the velvet draperies, sits on the divan, breathing heavily. She's too ancient to have a name any longer. When she coughs you can hear the ages rattling inside her shrunken frame. No human names can cling to her any more- they slip from her dusty shriveled flesh like a young girl's whimsies.

Imagination is a cruel master to the jealous man.

We move in spasms.

Ghosts will forever put in appearances, as they should. Our illusions have muscle and meaning. The past returns at midnight, in the heart of our dreams, and the rains and the willows forever remind us of the sacrifices we’ve offered and those we have yet to make.

Every guy liked to think that his demons were meaner and crazier than anybody else's.

The past can come back in a lot of different ways, chile. It don’t get old and wind up buried like people do. It can die and be reborn. Sins take on shape and peck at your face.

Coincidence only carries so far, and then you just have to figure that the universe wants to fuck you up as much as possible.

Christa Faust

You know, Dean said, gesturing with his uninjured hand. If we were in an action movie, this would be the scene where you tenderly dress my wounds. then the wailing guitar ballad would kick in and we'd end up rolling around on the bed in a slow motion montage.
If I were in Q, The Winged Serpent, Xochi replied, this would be the scene where I sacrifice you to Quetzalcoatl.

Dean had never quite imagined his life might end like this. Naked in a Tijuana brothel with an eighty-year-old woman dressed like Janine from Spinal Tap sizing up his junk and looking distinctly unimpressed. He really wished the room wasn't so heavily air-conditioned.

Hell's a dry heat too. It still sucks. Let me know if you pull anything. I'm gonna go get a cold beer and pour it down my pants.

I hate malls. They're like strip clubs for women. All tease and sparkle and the empty promise that if you just drop enough cash, somehow you'll be fulfilled.”

No disrespect to your people, but we're not going to San Francisco here. I ain't wearing any flowers in my hair, Dean said.

Meg Gardiner

Was it hard to watch people go?
No. Breathing afterward, every day, was harder.

Running cured almost anything. It eased pain; it exhilarated; it served as penance and validation. It turned lone wolf into a compliment. Running was objective – the stop-watch never lied. Races judged competitors on how long and hard they could run fast, not on a coach’s decision to play favorites with the starting lineup. Running was pure.

I've been an investigator longer than you've been playing Vulcan Mind Meld with dead people.

Fight or flight. When you have to jump, do it.

But fate was a myth constructed by fools—people who gamble or follow horoscopes, who believe the stars rule their lives.

The thing was, Zero liked breaking things. He saw no reason why the world should be allowed to stay hole.

God save us from people who think they know what’s best for us.

She didn't want to wait. Didn't want caution, or care, or tender exploration. She needed touch, sensation, raw blank sex to overwhelm her circuits. She held on to him, and they were all arms and elbows and grasping hands...She didn't want to talk-to talk would be to break the spell, the new thing that was happening, herself coming back into the world, with another damaged person as her guide.

Robert Ferrigno

The faith is not the problem, Bernadette. The problem is the faithful.

Surviving dangerous times require a sense of humor.

The man who shouts wins battles; the quiet man wins the war.

God and I have decided to ignore each other. It's for the best.

Young warriors are always eager for battle. Old warriors know better.

Most preachers say the nature of God is unknowable, but I'm certain of one thing at least. God almighty has a sense of humor.

Adapt or die, that's as true for religion as it is for people.

To fool somebody else, you have to fool yourself first.

C. J. Box

In Joe’s experience, the person who talked the most very often had the least to say.

On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Bellotti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up. Until then, their marriage had been happy.

Nothing spells trouble like two drunk cowboys with a rocket launcher.

Children were not pets, not furniture, not items put on earth to bring pleasure to people who owned them, she raged to herself.

Wyomingites, Joe had observed, didn’t know what to do when it rained except get out of it, watch it through the window, and wait for it to go away.

Yellowstone, a place so special and awe-inspiring that after exploring it in 1871, the Hayden Expedition conceived of the original concept of the world’s first national park—a set-aside of 2. 2 million acres containing more than ten thousand thermal features, canyons, waterfalls, and wildlife—so no man or corporation could ever own it.