Sara Paretsky > Quotes

“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.”
― Sara Paretsky, Bleeding Kansas

“When you're struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.”
― Sara Paretsky, Brush Back

“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.”
― Sara Paretsky (Brush Back)

“Some men can only admire independent women at a distance.”
― Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only

“about your actions. You keep me totally in”
― Sara Paretsky, Tunnel Vision

“On NCIS or White Collar, I’d forcefully persuade a reluctant judge to issue a search warrant and then persuade my equally reluctant boss to give me access to a portable X-ray machine, and then I’d find Sebastian’s body and make an arrest—after a near-death escape from Nabiyev, whom I’d overpower despite his bigger size and more massive gun power. I wished I were a TV detective.”
― Sara Paretsky, Brush Back

“The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.”
― Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders

“It’s always struck me as the ultimate insult to pay to park at hospitals; they incarcerate your friends and relations in rooms that cost six or seven hundred dollars a day, then put a little sting in by charging a few extra bucks to visit them.”
― Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders

“The person who loses their temper loses the battle.”
― Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt

“Now I've heard everyhing, I thought. Hired to find a person so her boyfriend would go to business school.”
― Sara Paretsky, Indemnity Only

“You know, if Tony had turned you over his knee more often instead of spoiling you rotten, you'd be a happy housewife now, instead of playing at detective and making it harder for us to get our job done.

But I'm a happy detective, Bobby, and I made a lousy housewife.”
― Sara Paretsky

“One last question, son,” he said to Felix. “Who were you expecting to see back there?” “I—no one,” Felix stammered. “You asked where he was from,” McGivney said. “Where did you think that would be?” “I don’t know,” Felix said, shifting unhappily from foot to foot.”
― Sara Paretsky, Shell Game

“Doris thought life was like a high-speed train where you kept leaving friends and brothers and lovers at stations along the route. Maybe when you died, you walked back down the tracks until you met each of the people you’d lost. You collected them all, brother Logan, mother, father, Lucinda, and you got to find a quiet garden where you sat and watched the sun go down, the huge red-gold Kansas sun sinking behind the waves of wheat, while you sipped a little bit of a martini that your beloved had mixed for you.”
― Sara Paretsky, Fallout

“wine! pizza! pasta!' V.I.”
― Sara Paretsky, Deadlock

“Early to bed, early to rise, leaves me cranky with rings under my eyes.”
― Sara Paretsky, Critical Mass

“Ship,” he said absently. “A boat is something you haul aboard a ship.”
― Sara Paretsky, Deadlock

“his back to her. “Vic, how long’s it been?” “How’d you end up down here, Sid?” I asked. “I thought you knew better than to put yourself in the crosshairs.” “Nobody asks me to go out on the street anymore and I got me a weekend place down near Schererville.” He winked, meaning, I suppose, that he was actually living down in Indiana—a no-no for someone on Chicago’s payroll. Sid had been one of my dad’s last partners, after Tony had been redeemed from cop hell: my dad had been sent to West Englewood”
― Sara Paretsky, Brush Back

“Judy 'preserved,' Homeland Security 'confiscated.' All these pretty names for theft. You hear more euphemisms for lying, cheating, even pedophilia, on the news in a week than you hear truth in a year.”
― Sara Paretsky, Critical Mass

“you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.”
― Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders

“of Place and the rest of her Hollywood oeuvre. Ferring had won two Emmys for Lakeview, the Jeffersons look-alike series she’d starred in. She’d been photographed at one White House gala with President Clinton and another”
― Sara Paretsky, Fallout

“Is Chad your only child?" I asked, just as a way to prod him into speaking.

"My only one, and I didn't even know he was in trouble, not until one of the gals in the office called me Saturday night. My own boy, and I didn't know. That's what that I-raq war did, turned him into a boy who couldn't call his old man when he was in trouble."

"Would he have, before the war?"

He nodded. "We used to talk every day, even when he was off at Grand Valley State. Even when he first deployed. But then the war got to him. The violence. He saw his whole unit die around him during his third deployment, and that did him in. It was like he blamed me, in a way."

"Blamed you?"

"I thought a lot about this," he said. "I think he felt I should have protected him. I was his dad, see, and he always, oh, looked up to me. At least when he was small. I worked construction my whole life, although I'm a project manager now, for Mercurio. I was stronger than most guys, and Chad, he thought I could always take care of trouble around him, or me, and I always thought so, too. Until he went off to I-raq, where no one could protect him. It's in my dreams all the time, that I should have saved him from seeing what he had to see. I couldn't save him, and he couldn't talk to me anymore.”
― Sara Paretsky, Body Work

“She came over to me and held me close to her. “You are the daughter of my heart, Victoria. I know it’s not the same as having Gabriella, but the love is there”
― Sara Paretsky, Blood Shot

“No doubt Gervase Fen or Peter Wimsey would immediately have grasped the vital clue revealing the identity of the murderer. But to me it looked like wreckage.”
― Sara Paretsky, Bitter Medicine

“But one of them had on an Army medal, a service medal, something like that. Do you know all of Chad's Army friends?"

Radke gave a helpless gesture. "I don't know. The five of us who were in counseling together at the VA, we're the ones who hung out, went to bars or Hawks games or whatever. But maybe they were from that college he went to over in Michigan. You know, if they stopped in Chicago to see him he wouldn't necessarily mention it to us."

The difference between cats and dogs-if two women had spent two or three nights a week together for four months, they'd know each other's family histories for four generations back, not to mention their taste in everything from linebackers to lingerie.”
― Sara Paretsky, Body Work

“Every time Nadia painted on the Artist here, Chad exploded. If all Nadia cared about was her sister, then I'm guessing Chad knew her sister, right?"

"You're the person making up the story." The Body Artist put on a camisole and then pulled a heavy sweater over it. "Something about Nadia bothered him so much he shot her, and it could have been her cunt, since that's what most guys see when they look at a woman."

"And so you display yours as a defiant statement: If that's all you think I am, that's what I'll be?”
― Sara Paretsky, Body Work

“No,” I said, “when you’re struggling to survive, no one gets to label you a coward, not even you yourself in your private thoughts.”
― Sara Paretsky, Brush Back

“As Harry Truman sort of said, if a detective wants a friend, she should get a dog.”
― Sara Paretsky, Love & Other Crimes

“pulling my leg. Well, don’t stay alone here too late,”
― Sara Paretsky, Hard Time

“walked in under the orange legs of the three-story Calder designed for Chicago’s Federal Building. We pride ourselves in Chicago on our outdoor sculptures by famous artists. My favorite is the bronze wind chimes in front of the Standard Oil Building, but I have a secret fondness for Chagall’s mosaics in front of the First National Bank. My artist friends tell me they are banal.”
― Sara Paretsky, Killing Orders

“In time-honored pig fashion, I sidestepped the question.”
― Sara Paretsky, Pay Dirt