Scarpetta Quotes

“At some level we intend everything we do. That’s why it’s extremely important to root out our intentions before they uproot us.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“Fucking stupid to park there to begin with.” “Usually the bigger worry is regular people and the media thinking they can poke around. But no marked car? Okay. There goes your deterrent. Have it your way. You got any idea why the entrance lights weren’t on last night?” Marino said. “I only know that they weren’t. It’s in my report.” “They’re on now.” Gusts of wind hit them like invisible waves of a stormy surf, and Marino felt as if he was about to be washed off the roof. His hands were stiff, and he pulled his sleeves over them. “Then my guess would be the killer turned them off last night,” Morales said. “Kind of a strange thing to do once he’s already inside the building.” “Maybe he turned them off when he was leaving. So nobody would see him, in case someone was walking by, driving by.” “Then you’re probably not talking about Oscar doing it. Since he never left.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“satellite dish. It was an inexpensive Internet camera that included audio, and was connected to the building’s wireless network and served any tenant who wished to join it. It also served somebody else. It served Mike Morales, and not in the way everybody thought, which was why it hadn’t occurred to Lucy to check. And she was furious with herself. Since it was known that another device was connected to the network—the camera that Morales said he had installed himself—it hadn’t entered Lucy’s mind to access the log to the wireless router. It hadn’t occurred to her she ought to check the router’s admin page. Had she done that last night, she would have discovered what she now knew, and she tried Marino again. For the past half-hour, she’d tried him and Berger, and had gotten voicemail. She didn’t leave a message. She wasn’t about to leave a message the likes of the one she had. This time Marino answered, thank God. “It’s me,” she said. “You in a wind tunnel, or what?” he said.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“It’s about people being small and your reminding them of it without trying to, and so they go out of their way to make you small as if that will somehow make them bigger.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“She wasn’t going to be his whore, his madonna, his wife, or his mother, or all of the above, and all of the above was what he’d really always wanted, what most men have always wanted because they don’t know any better.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“Their disconnection wasn’t simply due to the vicissitudes of very busy lives that collide and then resume their separate paths.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“32 Scarpetta refilled coffees and carried them out on a tray with a few things to eat. She believed that sleep deprivation was healed by good food. She set down a platter of fresh buffalo mozzarella, sliced plum tomatoes, and basil dribbled with cold-pressed unfiltered olive oil. In a sweetgrass basket lined with a linen napkin was crusty homemade Italian bread that she urged everyone to pass around, to break it with their hands, to tear off pieces. She told Marino he could start, and he took the basket, and she placed small plates and blue-checked napkins in front of him, then one in front of Bacardi.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“People in love don’t see each other only one night a week,”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta

“I realize it isn’t exactly in England. I know Isle of Man’s a fucking island, but in case you flunked geography, England’s a fucking island.”
― Patricia Cornwell, Scarpetta