Chelsea Cain Quotes

Tae kwon do required focus, strength, and endurance, but mostly it required the ability to deal with looking like an ass in public.

I like signing books for a living; I do. But you have no idea the panic that sets in. I am not a very good speller. Put me in a stresser situation, and I lose all capacity to recall how to spell the most simple names.

He said that I was his person," she told him. "He said that we all have people in the world we belong to. Connect with. And that I was his. He said that there was no denying it.

My husband and I were excited about having a kid - it was having a baby that had us worried. We had a lot to learn, so like good liberal arts graduates, we signed up for a class.

I was obsessed with Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan books, delightfully twisted stuff.

How did I get here? I'm not rich. Not a mutant. Not a genius. Not a natural. I just try harder. I always have.

I used to write travel essays, and I was struck by how the fact of writing about a place would change my relationship with it. I would make completely different choices, do things I wouldn't have normally, because I had to fill this narrative shape.

I finished 'Heartsick' with my daughter asleep in her bassinet by my desk, a feat that any new mother will tell you cannot be sufficiently praised.

I often keep my eyes open for bodies. I do. Ever since I was a kid. I think I read too many 'Nancy Drew' books.

I've always been more interested in what happens after the bad thing has happened - the fallout of the bad thing, when people are already damaged. I'm less interested in seeing people when they're fine and following their journey to becoming damaged.

I was born in Iowa City and spent my early childhood on a hippie commune just outside of town.

Our relationship is complicated by the fact that I am emotionally retarded.

In that moment she realised that Archie had never told her anything, never let her see anything, that he didn't want her to know.

I guess people might be surprised to know I read comic books. I'm a Marvel girl, as opposed to DC.

She'd liked Pearl. Pearl hadn't meant to Tazer Archie. Well, she meant to Tazer him, but how was she supposed to know that her then-boyfriend was going to drag Archie away, suspend him naked from meat hooks and try to hack him up with an ax?
Hadn't everyone had a bad boyfriend at some point?
Pearl had made some bonehead choices, but she had a good heart.

Why did you come here?' Gretchen asked.
'To kill you,' Archie said.
'How badly do you want it?'
'Pretty badly,' Archie said.

I was pregnant with my daughter when I started writing my first thriller, so I guess you could blame hormones.

You should have me restrained,' she said. 'I could kill you. You never know when I might have a razor blade tucked up my sleeve.'
'Why kill me now?' Archie said. 'It would seem anticlimactic.

I know that there's a cultural expectation that women be nurturing, delicate flowers. And I am. So delicate. But that doesn't mean I can't write a good, gory murder scene.

The digital clock that sat on the empty bookcase blinked insistently in the dim room. It was an hour and thirty-five minutes off, but Archie had never bothered to reset it, he just did the maths to calculate the time.

The Bermuda Triangle coughs up myths like a consumptive asthmatic. Missing vessels are blamed on aliens. Atlantis. Time rifts. Ghost ships. Magnetic anomalies. Methane eruptions. People go mad. People lose their minds. Sometimes I think I've been in the Bermuda Triangle my whole life.

When I say that I went to grad school in Iowa City, people often assume that I went to the famed writers' workshop MFA program at the University of Iowa. I didn't. I got a master's in journalism.

I'm a good person. I eat pretty well. I work out. I go to bookstores. I save people. For a living. I have better things to do than get hauled in for a medical checkup every week. Have I complained the last few months? Constantly. Was I a good patient? No. What can I say? When your primary care provider is a shadowy government agency, you have to be your own medical advocate.

What's she like?' Archie repeated softly. He put his hand on the trooper's shoulder and leaned forward, so his face was inched from his. Gretchen was a beautiful, sensual, charismatic, manipulative bitch, the object of Archie's sexual obsession, his torturer, and the person who knew him best in the world. 'She's a serial killer,' Archie said. He smiled and gave the trooper's shoulder an avuncular pat. 'If you ever lay eyes on her, shoot her.'
Archie turned to Henry. 'I'm ready to go back to the loony bin,' he said

One. And I hid it. And Mia Turner found it because they

Her body was spattered with tiny bits of the reverend's flesh and blood, like someone had combined shrimp and tomato soup and then forgot to put the lid on the blender.

Susan was already rehearsing excuses in case she was caught: I just got my period and I was looking for a tissue to stuff in my underpants. Men didn't question menstruation stories. Ever. You could probably get into the White House if you said you needed a tampon ASAP.

Gah! It's never going to be safe. There will always be another monster. How am I supposed to grow up to be a bad ass... if you don't let me be brave?

I read a lot of 'Nancy Drew' books as a kid and considered myself a bit of an amateur detective.

That was emasculating." "Says the guy wearing the collar.

Gretchen took a beautiful mugshot.

She was a beautiful girl, but the lack of any spark dampened her prettiness.

Don't let your characters tell you what to do. They can be pushy. Some writers say that they create characters and then just sort of follow them around through the narrative. I think that these writers are out of their minds.

We lie to each other all the time, remember?' she said with an amused smile.
'Tell me,' Archie said, 'and I'll believe you.

But people in masks were always assholes. It was a scientific law. Give someone anonymity and all social niceties break down. The Internet had proven that.

You won't make a living writing until you learn to write when you don't want to.

I love the fact that we are surrounded by this spectacular natural beauty that routinely strikes us dead. Hikers walk off into the woods and are never seen again. And still we tug on our fleece and skip off into the wilderness, not a care in the world.

Whatever you think this is going to be like," she whispers, "it's going to be worse.

People read stuff over your shoulder when you're in public, and when you write the kind of stuff I do, and people read it over your shoulder, it makes you a little self-conscious.

The chalk dust was everywhere. On her pants. All over her shirt. She looked like she'd fallen into a vat of 1980s eye shadow. It had mixed with her hand sweat and formed a kind of Smurf epoxy.

I think of it as the lasagna approach to writing because I'm always adding layers. I'll sometimes do it layer by layer, with dialogue, attribution, action, objects in the scene, setting ... It can be sometimes that delineated.

I felt like I'd culturally arrived when a character on the HBO show 'True Blood' was reading a hardback of 'Heartsick' at Sookie's kitchen table.

No matter what fabulous place I visit, I don't feel like I'm on vacation unless I'm dehydrated and covered with sunscreen.

Gretchen's eyes blazed at Henry. 'Don't ever think you can know what I'll do

I grew up in Washington State and then eventually found my way back to Iowa City for grad school.

There's something about the Pacific Northwest, the scale of it, and the fact that not so long ago people came here and died getting here, and then died the first winter they were here. There's this breathtaking beauty, just a little bit of moss on the tree, just this little thread of danger, and the sinister. And I really like that.

I like to think of you not being able to end your suffering,' she said.
'I like to think of you not being able to satisfy your blood-lust,' he said.

Writing tips are like mini skirts. Sometimes they fit perfectly, sometimes they make you cry, and sometimes you can reuse the material and sew yourself a pillow or something.

That woman was always very good at not seeing what was in front of her. In my experience, people who lie to themselves long enough don't even know when they're blind.

A face that looked like it had been whittled out of driftwood.

They were going to have a conversation, he realized. Archie didn't know a lot about women, but he had been married and he knew when a conversation was coming, and he knew when a woman wanted to have one, the best thing you could do was get it over with.

I wanted you to understand right away how committed I am to you ... That you are the only one

Josie, like Gretchen, isn't afraid of blood. What woman would be?

If Gretchen had been feeling charitable she would have let me die ... I wanted to die. I was ready to die. If she had put a scalpel in my hand, I would have stabbed myself in the neck and happily bled to death right there in her basement. She didn't do me any favours by not killing me. Gretchen enjoys people's pain. And she just found a way to prolong my pain and her pleasure. Believe me, it was the cruellest thing she could have done to me. If she could have thought of something crueller she would have done it. Gretchen doesn't show people mercy.

I love to write just about more than anything, but there are times I have to force myself to sit down and work. I want to play with my daughter or watch a movie with my husband or go outside on the nicest day of the year. But if writing is going to be your job, you have to treat it like a job.

If it were that important, SHIELD would have sent me." "Remember that conversation we had about being more supportive?" "Sorry.

We lie to each other all the time. Whatever we say, it doesn't mean anything."
"I'll believe you," she said.

You're wrong, you know," Susan said. "She doesn't belong here. I'm against the death penalty. I don't think the state should be in the business of killing people. I think it's wrong. And it's hypocritical. Mostly, I just think it's mean. Gretchen Lowell ? She is the exception. She deserves to die. If we kill one person, one criminal in the history of the world, it should be her." Susan paused, reconsidering. "And Hitler. Her, and Hitler". Prescott had that shrink look on his face again, passive and unimpressed, and yet somehow judgmental at the same time. Susan continued. "She removed a detective's spleen without anesthesia. She stuck a wire through an old woman's eyeball and then threaded it behind her nose and out through the other eye socket and then she stuck the wire into an outlet."
Prescott raised an eyebrow. "And you're arguing that she's sane?

In that moment Archie realised that Gretchen had never told him anything, never let him see anything that she didn't want him to know. She had always been in control. She had always been one move ahead.

Ugly people kill people all the time. But when pretty people did, it got attention.

What's your name, honey?" Frank asked her. "Beth Riley," she said. She could hear footsteps overhead as the agents stomped around her parents' bedroom upstairs. "What's your real name?" he asked. Her skin prickled. "Beth Riley," she said again.

He's not like his father. She reconsidered this. I mean, he's not perfect. But he's not Scarface.

I was a library rat and a bookworm. I read all the time. I walked to school reading books. I read under my desk.

As a seven-year-old, I remember when Etan Patz disappeared and was immortalized as the first missing-child face on a milk carton.

His whole relationship with Gretchen was one long postcoital illusion