The Poet (Jack McEvoy, #1; Harry Bosch Universe, #5)

by Michael Connelly

Or maybe it was something every cop could believe about every other cop. Maybe they’d all seen too many corpses and the only surprise was that most didn’t kill themselves.

Still not enough mental health support for law enforcement.

I remembered hearing somewhere that some of the lake fish get frozen in the winter but when the thaw comes in spring they wake up and just snap out of it. I wondered if it was true and thought it was too bad people weren’t the same way.

Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.

My suffering is my passion, my religion. It never leaves me. It guides me. It is me. I can see that now. I think what is meant by those words is that our pain is the pathway upon which we make our life’s travels and choices. It paves the way, so to speak, for all that we do and become.

“Are you aware that your use of coarse language is a rather lame attempt to reestablish your sense of male superiority?”

Why is it, I wondered, that it is the ones who mean so much that are the hardest to reach out to?

I wasn’t sure what love was but I knew acceptance was part of it.

1000%

“I guess you never heard that you supposedly can catch more flies with sugar than with lemon.” “Why waste the sugar on flies?” he replied.

There is a means to every end. A root to any cause. Sometimes the root is more evil than the cause, though it’s the cause that is usually the most vilified.”

At one point in the dark I tasted tears on her cheeks and she held me tighter than she had ever done before. There was a bittersweet feel to our lovemaking. It was as if two sad and lonely people had crossed paths and had agreed to help heal each other.

What’s that line that Nietzsche said? ‘Whoever fights monsters…’ ” “ ‘Should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.’ ”