Laura Lippman Quotes

he began, over dinner at Cantler's, a much beloved but out-of-the-way restaurant near

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.

Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.

Allowing one's self to be forgiven is just as hard as forgiving. Harder in some ways. Because to be forgiven, one first has to admit to being at fault.

Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.

Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything. And if you could, you would wish you didn't.

Coitus interruptus by SWAT team. At last a form of birth control that was one hundred percent reliable.

Stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.

John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike doesn't know dick about what it's like to be a homicide cop in Baltimore.

It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn't show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs.

Satisfactory husband that he was, he was a man and not one inclined to wax poetic about a day of cupcakes and movies.

Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it.

Sometimes you have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them. (7)

He has to know what she's saying is too good to be true. Good Lord, if this were the kindest way to break u with a woman, that would be the greatest thing that ever happened to men. Maybe she should write an advice book for men, one that tells them everything they want to hear, as opposed to all those books for women, which tell them to be the opposite of what they are, no matter what that is.

Isn't that supposed to be the scariest sentence in the world?" Infante asked. "We're from the government and we're here to help you.

Just because you worked hard on something didn't make it worth doing.

Cain - and the password, "Indemnity." Given how rapidly management changed at the Beacon-Light, it was entirely plausible that this familiar

Listen, you know? Girls. They don't listen. They're in too much

Going to college don't make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an over can call itself a biscuit.

They were, as a family, constantly on the verge of being dangerously, enviably cute.

She was furious, with the kind of fury peculiar to the nonpaying client. Those who can't afford private attorneys ... assumed legal aid was incompetent. Do-gooders were simply losers in disguise.

Talking about the characters in a book she had enjoyed felt like gossiping about friends.

There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.

You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought,. It's still a play where everyone dies in the end.

I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes.

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.

It's what's in the book that matters. Standing in her daughter's room which also had shelves and shelves filled with books, Tess remembered a character in a favorite story saying that to someone who objected to using the Bible as a fan on a hot summer day. But she could no longer remember which story it was.
Did that mean the book had ceased to live for her? The title she was trying to recall could be in this very room, along with all of Tess's childhood favorites, waiting for Carla Scout to discover them one day. But what if she rejected them all, insisting on her own myths and legends, as Octavia has prophesied? How many of these books would be out of print in five, ten years? What did it mean to be out of print in a world where books could live inside devices, glowing like captured genies, desperate to get back out in the world and grant people's wishes?

He brought down Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jay Cantor's Krazy Kat, then grabbed an omnibus volume of Dick. "And this is the book that inspired the film we saw tonight." Tess stifled a laugh, but not the surge of affection behind it. Where some might have seen an almost woeful ignorance

I begin each book with a challenge to myself.

The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don't take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and-rarest of the rare-a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next.

I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times article on the subject of modern attitudes toward our slave-holding past, the writer noted that we all want to be from "innocent origins." I _know_ I'm not. Then again, I suspect most of us are not.

What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson?

I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.

Working on the editorial page had sharpened Whitney's mind and coarsened her feelings, so she treated every subject as theoretical and abstract. Devil's advocate? Whitney could have been the devil's mentor.

The thing people are never indifferent to are differences.

I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.

Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn't seem to like you that much.

How magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?

She had always thought of it as being rich, having so many books she has yet to read.

How we treat our dead is central to our humanity.

He turns on the radio and it's that goddamn song that's on the radio all the time this summer, the one about chasing waterfalls. No one chases a waterfall. You go for a swim and next thing you know, the current catches you and throws you right over.

Literally. Unlike most people, even allegedly educated ones, he used

McCafferty's was a Mount Washington steak house, sort of the Palm Lite, with caricatures of Baltimore celebrities hanging

Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.

There it was again, another strange usage. 'We had words.' Everyone has words...What a useless euphemism. The phrases that people used to make things prettier never worked.

It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.

Lu Googles "Jonnie Forke" - nothing. Literally, nothing, which is bizarrely impressive. She plugs "Jonnie Forke" in Facebook, finds an entry for Juanita Forke. Graduated Centennial High School. No overlap with Drysdale there. Relationship status, single. She has only seventy-four friends, so she's one of those people who actually uses Facebook for friends, yet doesn't think to opt for the highest-security settings. To be fair, the site changes its privacy policy so often, some well-intentioned people don't realize their fences are down. Lu

The human mind was set up to categorize, generalize. It makes life so much simpler. I want to tell you that I never, ever think in stereotypes, but the more precise truth is that when I catch a stupid thought skittering across the surface of my brain, I send little villagers after it with torches. I check myself constantly, like a mother looking for deer ticks at the end of a camping trip. "What's that? Is it a speck of dirt or something hateful, something dangerous?" You don't want these stupid suckers to take root.

The problem was that such simple, ordinary bliss seldom formed memories. It was too smooth and silken to adhere. It was the bad stuff, ragged and uneven, that caught, like all those plastic grocery bags stuck in the trees of Baltimore.

As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.

This was the second job she had lost in the last eight months, and for the same reasons. Not a people person. Not a self-starter. Showed no initiative. She wanted to argue that minimum-wage jobs such as this shouldn't require initiative. She knew how to live inside an hour, how to weather the slow passing of time. She could endure boredom better than anyone she knew. Wasn't that enough? Apparently not.

Relationships are chess for women," he said. "They can see the whole board, plan way ahead. They're the queens, after all. We're the kings, limited to one square in any direction, on defense for the whole fucking game.

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.

In her experience, it was those first sixty seconds, from the moment she flashed her P.I. license to the end of her pitch, that she was most likely to earn someone's cooperation. Older people were the easiest, if only because they were so often bored out of their minds that they welcomed any distraction. Men were curt, but they usually found the time, as long as she did the little-me, big-eye, big-chest thing. Women were more skeptical, because women spent their lives listening to bullshit.

All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.

It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart.

Are you using 'he' generically, or because it seems probable that a man did this?"

Hunt shrugs, indifferent to pronouns. Men can afford to be.

It's very different to have this kid that I'm truly responsible for.

I like to see writers reach bigger and bigger audiences, and stand-alones have allowed some of them to do just that.

She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy.

Being a mother was like being trapped in the first fifteen minutes of a horror film. Everything was fine, lovely. But there was this persistent sense of dread.

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would.

The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit--it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.

To be an "American," as [citizens] of the United States so blithely called themselves, as if no other country in the hemisphere existed

Her dilemma - the eternal human dilemma - is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future.

Things have happened - so fast. Ten days ago, we didn't even know Rudy was sleeping rough again." "Isn't that a British term?" "It is." Mrs. Drysdale is allowed to speak to this at least. "But Rudy liked it. He said it was more like the way he lived. He wasn't homeless. Our door was always open to him. Always.

Feeding her raw oysters at Charleston, or sharing the gingerbread with lemon chiffon sauce at Bicycle.

Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.

Of course, she had paid for her books –most of them. Like almost every other bibliophile on the planet, Tess had books, borrowed from friends, that she had never returned, even as some of her favorite titles lingered in friends' homes, never to be seen again.

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.

We become comfortable saying that there's nothing new, and then something like Malarky comes along, which is new and old and different and familiar, but ultimately itself, comfortable in its own skin, wise and smart and crazy-sexy or maybe sexy-crazy-well, you just have to read it to understand. It's a novel that sets its own course, sure and steady, even when it seems like it might be about to go over the edge of the world.

Fenwick, sitting down to

Everyone cared what others thought, even those who were defiantly different. They cared more than anyone.

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.

I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.

I would prefer," Pat said, his voice a little stiff, as if he expected resistance, "that I be the cosigner on the loan, if you go through with this. I know I'm not a famous billionaire, but I think my credit's just as good."
No, you're wrong about that," Tess said, shaking her head.
What?"
As far as I'm concerned, it's better. I'd much rather do business with you."
They shook on it. It was a deal, after all, not a time for hugging.
Favors, Arnie Vasso had once said. Your father knows all about favors. He had meant it as an insult, a sly reference to the corners the Monaghans and Weinsteins cut here and there. Now Tess saw it for the simple truth it was: Her father understood favors. How to do them, how to accept them, how to walk away when the price was too steep. It was a lesson she wouldn't mind learning someday.
Maybe this was the place to start.

I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.

My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.

Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.

sound silly, but I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did." Tess replayed these words in

Doing nothing," Inez said, "is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.

But she was Barbara Monroe, of Chicago, Illinois. She had attended a big-city high school, Mather. A big school in a big city was easier to fake than a small one, because anyone could be forgotten in a big school.

When destiny wants to fuck with you, it can afford to be patient. Destiny has all the time in the world.

and a Dr. Brown's celery soda.

The young woman at his side surveyed Tess in one quick, lethal glance. Tess could almost hear her brain clicking away on the sort of points system that some women used: Taller - 1 point for her. Hippy - 1 point against. Big breasts, long hair - 2 points for. Hair, unstyled, worn in a braid down her back - 2 points against. Older than me - 3 points against. Face, okay. Clothes, not stylish, not embarrassing. Tess wasn't sure of her final score, but apparently it was just a little too high. The woman gave her a terrifyingly fake smile, one that suggested she had little experience with real ones, and held out her hand.

Bring wine," she hissed into the phone. "And Matthew's pizza. Those lima beans with feta cheese from Mezze. Sopa-pillas from Golden West. Hurry!

It's a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.

She studied the notices pinned to the bulletin board, the pamphlets. DARE - Drug Awareness Education. No, wait, that didn't add up: Drug Abuse Resistance Education. An infelicitous name, all to create an acronym that didn't work, in Kay's opinion. It was too close to Drug Abuse Resists Education.

Where are you getting your material - Portnoy's Complaint?" "What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking