The Accident Quotes

“There’s an awful lot of beauty in Europe, but there’s also no shortage of ugly.”
― Chris Pavone, The Accident

“Brad had thought he’d been around long enough to see every circumstance in the book-publishing business present itself. He has seen surprise bestsellers come out of nowhere while supposedly guaranteed hits bombed, abysmally. He has encountered ecstatic authors and belligerent authors and authors who summarily broke contracts or initiated lawsuits or committed suicide or simply flipped out. He has seen books with signatures bound upside down, books distributed with the author’s name misspelled on the dust jacket, books missing their final crucial pages or cataloging-in-publication data, books with factual inaccuracies and libelous misstatements and egregious errors of judgment and taste. But he’s never seen this before.”
― Chris Pavone, The Accident

“her field of choice narrowed dramatically. Men tend to want women who are younger than they are, and Isabel is not exactly young. Plus the book-publishing business is disproportionately gay, especially in the editorial realms that constitute her day-to-day universe, and nearly all the rest of them are married. Or they’re inappropriately young, or inconceivably old. So perhaps one in a hundred is single, straight, and in her age bracket, where she has discovered that this population tends to have more issues, more challenges, more performance-enhancing pills and unappealing personal proclivities, than the men she’d had in her twenties and thirties.”
― Chris Pavone, The Accident

“Accident Page 488”
― Chris Pavone, The Accident

“He steps into the brand-new coffee shop on the corner, one of those joints that specify the growers and regions and acidity levels of their humanely sourced fair-trade beans. He orders a three-dollar macchiato from an alarmingly muscled and extravagantly tattooed woman wearing a wifebeater and a skullcap, operating a machine that bears more than a passing resemblance to a Lamborghini, house music thumping at seven-thirty a.m., a miasma of patchouli.”
― Chris Pavone, The Accident

“This is how it happens: you spend your life reading, reading, and reading more, waiting, waiting, and waiting for something to be incredible. Each manuscript you start could be it, but thousands upon thousands aren't. And then one day, always hoped-for but never expected, there it is.”
― Chris Pavone, The Accident

“This he thinks is the secret to New York City’s vast productivity: everyone works all the time to avoid facing their loneliness.”
― Chris Pavone, The Accident