Sue Grafton Quotes

The space smelled

Happiness is seasonal, like anything else

I've given this a great deal of thought and what I've realized is that revenge doesn't have to be an eye for an eye. Retaliation can take any number of forms. It doesn't need to be crude or obvious. The point is, the pain should be equivalent; not tit for tat but something comparable.

Writing is a process and you must trust the process! Fear and anxiety are part of that process along with the enthusaism and the good days and the joy and the passion and the great hopes you have for a book. But when you run into problems, when you get stuck or scared, you must trust that that is part of how a book comes to pass, and what you need to do is get very still and quiet because Self will tell you how to get out of a hole you've dug for yourself.

It's hard to have faith in your fellow man when you're forced to look at some of his handiwork.

Train yourself to listen to that small voice that tells us what's important and what's not.

I don't. I take it he was homeless." Aaron shrugged. "That's my guess. A group of them have been congregating in that grassy patch across the street from the Santa Teresa Inn. Before that, they camped in the park adjacent to the municipal swimming pool." "Who called it in?" He took off his glasses and polished

He stared at me. His breathing made that wheezing sound that fat people sometimes make.

One immutable law of travel is that one's arrival or departure gate is always at the extreme outer limit of the terminal, especially if your bag is heavy or your shoes have just begun to pinch.

I'm always aware that under the spritely twitter of birds, bones are being crunched and ribbons of flesh are being stripped away, all of it the work of bright-eyed creatures without feeling or conscience. I don't look to nature for comfort or serenity.

panic inspires gross errors in judgement (Kinsey Millhone)

What could smell better than supper being cooked by someone else?

Henry is entirely invented though by now I feel he's as real as anyone I know.

He looked like an actor who'd star in some movie about a doomed love affair between an heiress and a park ranger. I thought it was probably inappropriate to fling myself against him and bury my nose in his chest.

The beauty of word processing, God bless my word processor, is that it keeps the plotting very fluid. The prose becomes like a liquid that you can manipulate at will. In the old days, when I typed, every piece of typing paper was like cast in concrete.

We all need to look into the dark side of our nature - that's where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we're busy denying.

The basic characteristics of any good investigator are a plodding nature and infinite patience. Society has inadvertently been grooming women to this end for years.

I used to have a crow named Albert. Bertie, when I got to know him better. I got him when he was just a little guy and had him for years. A young crow doesn't navigate well and they'll sometimes crash-land. They're called branchers at that age-that's about all they can do, lumber awkwardly from branch to branch. Sometimes they get stuck and they wail like babies until you get 'em down. Bertie must have bitten off a bit more than he could chew and he'd tumbled to the ground. I had a cat named Little John who brought him in, squawking hellishly. LJ and I had a tussle to see who was going to take possession. Fortunately for Bertie, I won the contest. He and the cat became friends later, but it was touch-and-go for a while there. LJ was pissed off because he thought this was Thanksgiving dinner and I was getting in his way (Dietz)

He has all the uncanny intuitions of a psychopath. Have you ever dealt with one? It's almost like a form of mind-reading ...

It is a truth of human nature that we can ponder life's mysteries for only so long before we lose interest and move on to something else.

I truly hate being a guest in someone's home ... Worst of all, you have to 'make nice' at all hours. I don't want someone across the table from me while I'm eating my breakfast. I don't want to share the newspaper and I don't want to talk to anyone at the end of the day. If I were interested in that shit, I'd be married again by now and put a permanent end to all the peace and quiet.

I thought about the current contamination of beaches, raw sewage spilling into oceans and streams, the hole in the ozone, forests being stripped, the toxic-waste dumps, the merry plunder of mankind added to the drought and the famine that nature dishes up annually as a matter of course. It's hard to know what's actually going to get us first. Sometimes I think we should just blow the whole planet and get it over with. It's the suspense that's killing me.

I've never written about my husband, Steve, or any of my children because I know them all too well. I see them in all their complexities which makes them impossible to render on the printed page.

The only colors I could see were the vibrant primary hues of the pinball machine, where a cartoon spacewoman with big conical breasts straddled the earth in a formfitting blue space suit and thigh-high yellow boots. Behind her, a big red dildo-shaped spaceship was just blasting off for the moon.

It's like people think just because you go to church you're not all that bright. I mean just because I'm a born-again doesn't mean I lost IQ points.

Kim Bass, Receptionist, was nowhere to be seen. This was fortunate, as I was so irritated with the way she'd treated me, I might have bitten her on the arm. I'd been a biter as a kid and I can still remember the feel of flesh between my teeth. It's like biting a rubber bathing cap, in case you're curious.

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

Age plays cruel tricks on the human face; all our repressed feelings become visible on the surface, where they harden like a mask.

The struggle is what teaches you.

Get old, you might as well not worry about your dignity. Anybody talks about dignity for old folks has never been around one as far as I can tell. You can keep your spunk, but you have to give up your vanity early on.

People make mistakes. People do things they never meant to do.

The louder he proclaims his honesty, the faster we count the silver.

Ordinarily, an alibi is an account of suspect's whereabouts at the time a crime was committed and it's offered up as proof of innocence, but here it didn't matter where anyone was.

Poise and indifference so often look the same.

Personally I don't endorse the notion of mortality. It's fine for other folk, but I disapprove of the concept for me and my loved ones. Seems unfair that we're not allowed to vote on the matter and not one of us is excused. Who made up that rule? - Kinsey Millhone

Insecure people have a special sensitivity for anything that finally confirms their own low opinion of themselves.

There were pieces missing yet but they would fall into place and then maybe the whole of it would make sense.

its embrace. The sky still claims them and we who honor them will hold them dear from this day forward.

I did discover that if you're interested in low wages, a bookstore ranks below retail clothing sales, except the hours are worse.

I know there are people who believe you should forgive and forget. For the record, I'd like to say I'm a big fan of forgiveness as long as I'm given the opportunity to get even first.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

I may have people lying to me, but since I don't really know the truth, I can't be sure.

Once upon a time, I'd come close to being killed in the big trash bin outside. This counts as nostalgia for someone like me (p. 317).
Kinsey Millhone in V is for Vengeance

So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.

The downside of fitness, which takes years to achieve, is how quickly it vanishes - almost instantly.

I like difficulty. It's what makes my job fun.

linen slipcovers, was as white as whole milk.

clients you'd swear up and down were total, unmitigated slobs, but they're actually the opposite - so hell-bent on 'clean and tidy,' they can't even start. Rather than fail, they give up. Their standards are so high, they're overwhelmed before they start. To them, it's better not even tackling the job.

If I'd been listening closely, I'd have caught the sound of the gods having a great big old tee-hee at my expense.

Smile. It gives your face something to do.

You kill people you hate or you kill in rage or you kill to get even, but you don't kill someone you're indifferent to.

You know what they say about living well as the best revenge. I did well because it was the one defense I had. Escape has been the motivating force in my life. Getting away from him, getting away from her, putting that household behind me. The funny this is, I haven't moved an inch, and the harder I run, the faster I keep slipping back to them ... There are laws for everything except the harm families do.

I made the rules I figured I could be the one to break them. I thought I would write about xenophobia, a hatred of foreigners. After I stated writing the story there was not a foreigner to be had. I did not want to just stick one in there so I could get a title out of it since it seemed like cheating. I never figured out how I could get out of this dilemma so I just called it X and weaved X traits into the story.

The Copse at Hurstbourne is one of those fancy-sounding titles for a brand-new tract of condominiums on the outskirts of town. 'Copse' as in 'a thicket of small trees.' 'Hurst' as in 'hillock, knoll, or mound.' And 'bourne' as in 'brook or stream.' All of these geological and botanical wonders did seem to conjoin within the twenty parcels of the development, but it was hard to understand why it couldn't have just been called Shady Acres, which is what it was. Apparently people aren't willing to pay a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a home that doesn't sound like it's part of an Anglo-Saxon land grant. These often quite utilitarian dwellings are never named after Jews or Mexicans. Try marketing Rancho Feinstein if you want to lose money in a hurry. Or Paco Sanchez Park. Middle-class Americans aspire to tone, which is equated, absurdly, with the British gentry.

To distract myself, I thought about all the cusswords I knew and arranged them in alphabetical order.

Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.

Pam is petite, a bristly little chihuahua of a human being. She is the only woman I ever met who claims to be ten years older than she actually is so everyone will tell her how young she looks.

When I'm with you, I don't feel self-conscious or like I'm crippled or ugly. I don't know how you do that, but it's nice.

I'm not cute at all. I'm a very cranky person.

You can always push people around, but it's not a good idea. Better to let them volunteer information for reasons of their own. You get more that way.

As it is, we could not call mine a beautiful puss, but it does the job well enough, distinguishing the front of my head from the back.

You try to keep life simple but it never works, and in the end all you have left is yourself.

I showered and shampooed. I even shaved the requisite legs and armpits just in case I fell in a swoon and one or the other was exposed to view. (Kinsey Millhone)

If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them.

Being rule governed, I operate in a world filled with imaginary restraints.

I left him where he was and went down the hall to the kitchenette, where I picked up the coffeepot and filled it with water. I poured the water into the reservoir and then opened a packet of coffee, the grounds neatly sealed in a filter that I tucked into the basket. I flipped the switch and stood there until I could hear the gurgling begin.

Growing up had made her crabby, which happens to the best of us.

Some death is as silent as the flight of a bird, some prey as unprotesting as a knot of rags. The

When all else fails, cleaning house is the perfect antidote to most of life's ills.

All you have to do is wait until she's asleep

He might be a man without character, but she was a woman without courage. Of the two, which was worse?

There are days when none of us can bear it, but the good comes around again. Happiness is seasonal, like anything else. Wait it out. There are people who love you. People who can help.

There is no sound so terrible as a man's sorrow for his own death.

Unplug yourself often and you risk losing touch with your feelings altogether.

People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland ... An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given.

Maybe life is just a straight shot from the horrors of grade school to the horrors of the nursing home.

What was done was done.

There are times when an old rule should be abandoned or a current rule should not be applied.

He opened his coat to reveal his badge, but I confess I didn't peer closely enough to commit the number to memory. This

Just what it said. I left a message telling him I had a garage full of stuff I needed to get rid of. I knew he'd be in the neighborhood the twenty-fourth, so all I had to do was give him my address. I had to be at work, so I put the fifty bucks in an envelope and taped it to the back door. I came home, he'd emptied the garage, and everything looked great." "So you never actually laid eyes on him and you never got his name?" "I needed the garage cleaned. I wasn't looking for a friend. What's the matter with you?

There's nothing quite as irksome as someone else's mess.

My take on the indigent is that some are there because of temporary setbacks, some by default, and some for lack of an alternative. Some are needy, some are off their meds, some have opted out, some have been ousted from facilities where they might be better served. Many are there for life and not always by personal choice. Alcoholic, addicted, aimless, illiterate, unmotivated, unskilled, or otherwise unable to prosper, they sink to the bottom, and if they're down for any length of time, they lose the capacity to climb back out of the hole into which they've fallen. If there's a remedy, I don't know what it is. From what I've seen of the problem, most solutions perpetuate the status quo.

These are the days that require discipline, when exercise is pure duty and the good feeling only comes later, consisting solely of self-congratulations for having done the job at all.

His stuff. His voice was

Writing is self-taught. Consulting other people only teaches you to depend on their reactions, which may or may not be legitimate. Quit looking for approval ... Learn to evaluate your own work with a dispassionate eye ... the lessons you acquire will be all the more valuable because you've mastered your craft from within.

Emotion doesn't travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view.

was adept, but it had been a while since

There's really no such thing as an 'ex-cop' or a cop who's 'off-duty' or 'retired.' Once trained, once indoctrinated, a cop is always alert, assessing reality in terms of its potential for illegal acts.

Another one of life's little jokes. I thought it was a tumor 'til it started to kick.

The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.

Missing someone is a vague, unpleasant sensation, like gnawing anxiety. It isn't as concrete as grief, but it's just as pervasive and there's no escaping it.

Dream big but think small.

There's nothinng like an outsider's idle glance to make you conscious of your own environment.

It's pitiful to have a life in which junk food is awarded the same high status as sex.

The truth is, I could no more dictate her nature than she could dictate mine. Kinsey's happy as she is and she doesn't need to be rescued, improved, or saved.

So far, I felt like I had a lapful of confetti and the notion of piecing it all together to make a picture seemed very remote indeed.

Built into bad news is that sense of profound disbelief. The mind struggles to absorb the bare facts, defending itself against the larger implications.

Shitting on a mouse is not expressly forbidden under California law.

I don't know what is love about and I'm not sure I believe in it anyway.