The Rope Quotes

“you use your whole body like you did when you played as a kid. Grown-up amusements don’t allow for crawling and wriggling, getting good and muddy, and tearing the knees of your pants.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“don’t want to come back as a seasonal interpreter,” Anna said finally. Jenny looked crestfallen. “I don’t blame you for that,” Steve said. “Let me know when you’d like your last day to be and I’ll get to work on the paperwork.” “No, I’m staying,” Anna said. “I want to come back in law enforcement.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“As a lover of the theater, Anna had been fascinated by what drove the human heart to self-destruct. That was over. Now all she cared about was that they be stopped.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“jealousy was not about caring, it was about fear of loss: loss of love, loss of power, or loss of security.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“Evil, true evil, in her—and, more scientifically, her psychiatrist sister’s—belief, fed on despair, the kind that suffocates every glimmer of light and life beneath a cold so intense it becomes darkness.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“My life is a Stephen King novel,” she whispered. “Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can’t get any worse, everybody dies.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“The shame attached to rape was men’s shame, shame they were too weak to carry: that their gender could do this, that they could do it, that they wanted to do it, that they could not protect their wives and sisters and daughters from it, that they could not stop it. That a thing they believed to be solely theirs could be taken by another man. That, should a child be born, the cuckold would be left to raise another man’s bastard.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“bad vibes, an underlying sickness or misery that oozed out around the edges of conversations and interactions.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope