Heather Gudenkauf

But you know all about that, being sorry and having no words to say something when you know you should but you just can't.

We're always one breath away from something, living or dying, sometimes it just can't be helped.

Every five-year-old kid should have a pair of happy pajamas.

Having a little girl has been like following an old treasure map with the important paths torn away.

Who you choose to walk with through life will be the most important decision that you will ever, ever make. You will have your children and you will love them because they are yours and because they will be wonderful. Just like you ... But who you marry is a choice. The man you choose should make you happy, encourage you in following your dreams, big ones and little ones.

You have to look for the little mercies, the small kindnesses and good that come from the terrible.

That's the wonderful thing about the human heart, there's room enough for all kinds of love.

John Hart

She turned the water scalding hot and scrubbed her face until it hurt, but the eyes still looked wrong. She tore off her clothes and stepped into the shower; but it was not enough. The dirt was on the inside.

Lightening falls, all you can do is- pray God that it doesn't fall on you.

We can all live with doubts. It's the knowing that breaks us.

Then she turned for the great mouth of a door, and by the time it inhaled her, she was a much older woman.

I'd been awake for thirty-six hours and driving for ten. Restless weeks, sleepless nights, and the decision stole into me like a thief. I never planned to go back to North Carolina- I'd buried it- but I blinked and found my hands on the wheel, Manhattan a sinking island to the north. I wore a week-old beard and three day denim, felt stretched by an edginess that bordered on pain, but no one here would fail to recognize me. That's what home was all about, for good or bad.

Disgust was an organ in Hunt's gut. The more he thought about it, the more it churned.

Steve Hamilton

I didn't know that once you've proven yourself useful to the wrong people, you'll never be free again.

Somewhere in the ocean, a shark was missing its cold eyes because this man had them.

Somewhere in the ocean, a shark was missing its cold eyes because this man had them.

Whoever's job it was to keep the room clean was clearly not an overachiever.

Once you freeze all the way through to your soul, you will never feel warm again.

So there it was. My big lesson of the day, something I’d take with me and never forget. The whole legal system – if you think it’s just a big set of rules, you’re dead wrong. It’s really a bunch of people sitting around and talking to each other, deciding what they want to do with you. When they make their decision, then they pull out whatever rule they need to make it happen.

Martha Grimes

Before you hate something you should try to understand it.

An idyllic childhood is probably illusion.

Remember the great film with Bette Davis, All About Eve? There's a scene after the scheming Eve steals Margo's role through trickery and then gets this magnificent review. Margo of course is effing and blinding all over the place. And crying. Her director rushes into her house, puts his arms around her and says, "I ran all the way". That's what I want.

We don't know who we are until we see what we can do.

Melrose was so concerned that the [book]shop might close for lack of business, that he had suggested he would like to invest in it or even become a silent partner. "You see, books have always been a hobby of mine." Books had never been a hobby; they were a necessity.

Elf made his way fuzzily back to the drawer, trying to think nasty thoughts about his tormentor (Mungo the dog) but he couldn't, as he was too little and his mind was formless and without messages.

Sara J. Henry

Some people you love while they're there, and some people you love forever, whether they're there or not.

Sometimes you know you've made the right decision, simply because of how hard it is.

This, I realized suddenly, was friendship. You didn't always agree, and you both might do things the other person wished you didn't, but it didn't mean things came to a grinding halt. It didn't mean you stopped being friends. You got over it, and you moved on.

I wish my conscience would come alive during the day, when the distractions of daytime life help obscure those sharp, prodding thoughts.

Don't think too much about it - we all have instincts to survive.

Sometimes letting the truth out lets people heal, and sometimes it makes things worse. And you couldn't really know which, until you did it, and sometimes only later.

Trying to figure out what dead people intended could drive you mad, especially when many people didn't really know what they wanted even when they were alive.

Robert Jackson Bennett

Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.

And Olvos said to them: “Why have you done this, my children? Why is the sky wreathed with smoke? Why have you made war in far places, and shed blood in strange lands?

The Divine may have created many hells", he says, "but I think they pale beside what men create for themselves.

My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it'll be here well after they walk away from it. My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective.

What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.

Is it ignorance if you don’t care to know it?” “Yes. That is almost the definition of ignorance, actually.

Life is full of beautiful dangers, dangerous beauties... They wound us in ways we cannot see: an injury ripples out, like a stone dropped in water, touching moments years into the future.

Keigo Higashino

Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone's saviour.

It’s more difficult to create the problem than to solve it. All the person trying to solve the problem has to do is always respect the problem’s creator.

Watching people is a bit of a hobby of mine. It's quite fascinating, really.

Even when you’re at the top, there’s always something higher.

The relationship between teacher and student is based on illusion. The teacher is under the illusion that he is teaching something, and the student is under the illusion that he is being taught. What’s important is that this shared illusion makes both teacher and student happy. Nothing good is gained by facing the truth, after all. All we’re doing is playing at education.

When you wander in the dark too long, you start to see things that aren’t really there.

He presented me with a mathematical conundrum,” he said. “It’s a famous one, the P = NP problem. Basically, it asks whether it’s more difficult to think of the solution to a problem yourself or to ascertain if someone else’s answer to the same problem is correct.

Mo Hayder

In most crime novels the violent act, usually the murder, is the engine. Take that away and there is little left to drive the story along. So I do get a little cross with authors who aren’t precise about the violence they’re using to create tension because I feel they’re being dishonest with their readers. If people don’t like the blood and violence in my books, fine, they can always close the cover and put it aside and maybe read a romance instead.

I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.

Lyndsay Faye

I hope that the epitaph of the human race when the world ends will be: Here perished a species which lived to tell stories.

We tell stories to strangers to ingratiate ourselves, stories to lovers to better adhere us skin to skin, stories in our heads to banish the demons. When we tell truth, often we are callous; when we tell lies, often we are kind. Through it all, we tell stories, and we own an uncanny knack for the task.

Hope, I've discovered, is a sad nuisance. Hope is a horse with a broken leg.

And in a way I have always thought that words are alive a little, for they can whisper sweet nothings and roar dragon flame with equal efficiency.

Being brave and being alone aren't the same thing.

Though I no longer presumed to have a conscience, I have never once lacked feelings.

Some tragedies bind us, as lies do; they are ropes braided of hurt and bitterness, and you cannot ever fully understand how pinioned you are until the ties are loosened.

Gillian Flynn

Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

There’s something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold.

There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.

Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.

It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

Love makes you want to be a better man—right, right. But maybe love, real love, also gives you permission to just be the man you are.