I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?

I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.

For a moment, I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars, and I knew, beyond any doubt, that everything was going to be alright.

Salvation not shared, is salvation wasted.

Good God, what a mess of draggle-tail impulses a man is--and a woman too, I guess.

We are the biggest donor to the United Nations, contributing 22 percent of the regular operating budget and nearly 27 percent of the peacekeeping budget.

The important thing to know about an assassination or an attempted assassination is not who fired the shot, but who paid for the bullet.

Kinsey Millhone is a female Sam Spade; a thorough professional, a loner, clear-headed and unsentimental.

He who hangs on the errors of the ignorant multitude, must not be counted among great men.

He musta thought it was white boy day. It ain't white boy day, is it?

Though we often wonder why God does what he does, we can be sure he does it on better information.

Led Zeppelin was a very sensitive and beautiful animal beast.

Don't think about what the market's going to do; you have absolutely no control over that. Think about what you're going to do if it gets there.