Tess Gerritsen Quotes

Jane remained in her chair thinking about justice, about how the dead never benefited from it. For them it always comes too late.

It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.

When you shine a bright light, a secret loses all its power.

I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.

For years I've wanted to write a book about mummies, and had been following the science of mummy CT scans when the premise for 'The Keepsake' occurred to me: what if an 'ancient' mummy turns out to have a bullet in its leg? How does a modern murder victim get turned into a mummy?

This unsub is a classic picquerist. Someone who uses a knife to achieve secondary or indirect sexual release. Picquerism is the act of stabbing or cutting, any repeated penetration of the skin with a sharp object. The knife is a phallic symbol--a substitution for the male sexual organ. Instead of performing normal sexual intercourse, our unsub achieves his release by subjecting his victim to pain and terror. It's the power that thrills him. Ultimate power, over life and death.

The dead do not hurt you; only the living do.

Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.

She'd loved their scent--not sweet and cloying like other flowers, but pungent. Assertive. She'd loved the way they sprang up wild in vacant lots and roadsides, reminders that true beauty is spontaneous and irrepressible.

That's what I imagined, a giant game park with comfortable lodges and roads. At a minimum, roads. According to the website, there'd be "bush camping" involved, but I pictured lovely big tents with showers and flush toilets. I didn't think I'd be paying for the privilege of squatting in the bushes.

The Christmas tree, twinkling with lights, had a mountain of gifts piled up beneath it, like offerings to the great god of excess.

There is honor between bitches

Society thinks of violent acts as manifestations of evil or immorality. We're told we have ultimate control over our own behavior, that each and every one of us has the free will to choose not to hurt another human being. But it's not just morality that guides us. Biology does as well. Our frontal lobs helps us integrate thoughts and actions. They help us weight the consequences of those actions. Without such control, we'd give in to every wild impulse.

The hardest part of writing is the first draft, and the closer you get to your deadline, the messier your workspace becomes - but that's the same with any creative outlet.

She was the only woman in the homicide unit, and already there had been problems between her and another detective, charges of sexual harassment, countercharges of unrelenting bitchiness.

Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.

'Ice Cold' is the eighth in my 'Rizzoli and Isles' thriller series. It was inspired by a true occurrence in the 1960s, now known as the 'Dugway Incident,' in which 6,000 sheep mysteriously died overnight in a remote area of Utah. I thought, 'What if it happened instead to people? What if the inhabitants of an entire village vanished overnight?'

With every year that I grow older, I also draw closer to (my loved ones) to the day when we will once again be together. So I march through the deepening shadows, serene and unafraid, because I know that at the end of my journey they will be waiting for me.

I spent my childhood watching every scary movie that Hollywood ever made. And I think that gave me the best education for storytelling. It also made me want to reproduce the scary moments that I felt, sitting in a theater at the age of 5.

I was an anthropology major in college, and I've had a lifelong fascination with Egyptology, mummies, and all sorts of bizarre cultural practices.

I raised two sons, and I know that even though they're bigger and stronger than I am, they're still little boys inside. They still cry, they still hurt. So whenever I write a male character, no matter how 'heroic' he may be, I think of my sons. And I remember that every man was once a little boy.

You can study a face all you want, but you never really know what lies beneath the mask.

I believe one has to get one's hand dirty or you're nothing but a hobbyist.

There's nothing as boring as perfection

I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

Only animals should have to pee in the woods.

When everything goes wrong in our lives, it's natural to look around for someone -or something- to blame.

The most intimate feeling people can share is neither love nor hate, but pain.

I look at the others seated around the campfire. Mr. and Mrs. Matsunaga are diligently reviewing the day's photos on his camera. Vivian and Sylvia lounge in their low-cut tank tops, oozing pheromones that make poor, awkward Elliot grovel for attention as usual. Are you gals chilly? Can I get your sweaters?

I'm sorry to say that too often, I haven't a clue why people do things like this. Why they drown their babies or strangle their wives or shoot their coworkers. I see the results of their actions, but I can't tell you what sets them off. I just know that it happens. And people are capable of doing terrible things.

She siged, a sound of regret for childhood transgressions, for all the lessons learned too late.

Because we bear responsibility for our own actions alone. Not for anyone else's.

If you want to remain at liberty, I suggest you not antagonize your defenders.

Now they were probably telling one another: Yeah, I knew something wasn't right. Everyone's brilliant in retrospect.

Life is a series of complications. We have to deal with each one as it comes.

Sometimes, the person who could make you happiest is the one who waits patiently in the wings.

She met his gaze, and what she saw in his eyes scared her, because at that instant she saw both possibility and heartbreak. She was ready for neither.

Children are like fomites." What?" "Spreading infections everywhere they go.

When you're a fifty-year-old woman, no one really bothers to look at you anymore, much less value your opinion. It's hard on the old ego. But damn, it does make it easy to get away with a lot.

My father was second-generation Chinese-American, born in 1923 in California. My mother emigrated to the States from China when she was in her early twenties, in part to escape the political turmoil in China.

I organise jam sessions every month. We have an open session, so everyone knows about it, and we can get as many as 30 people showing up at the house. Somebody will play a tune, and everyone will pick up on it. My best friends are all musicians.

But that doesn't explain the apparently random killing of women and children. No, there was something else behind it, the same thing that's inspired ritual murder cults around the world. Vast numbers of people have been sacrificed for a variety of beliefs. Whether you kill to terrify your enemies or to appease gods like Zeus or Kali, it all gets down to one thing: power.

My name is Mila, and this is my journey.
There are so many places where I could begin the story. I could start in the town where I grew up, in Kryvicy, on the banks of the Servac River, in the district of Miadziel. I could begin when I was eight years old, on the day my mother died, or when I was twelve, and my father fell beneath the wheels of the neighbour's truck. But I think I should begin my story here, in the Mexican desert, so far from my home in Belarus. This is where I lost my innocence. This is where my dreams died.

Without ties to our ancestors, we are lonely specks of dust, adrift and floating, attached to nothing and no one.

That's what makes life an adventure. Sometimes you just have to jump in and trust in the universe.

If you don't love him, if you don't even care about him, then seeing him now shouldn't be all that painful. Should it?

Does he think it's so easy? One smile, one touch and all is forgiven -Dr Maura Isles

a Dr. Mikovitz. He says you left a message this morning with one of his colleagues." "Oh, of course." Maura picked up the phone. "This is Dr. Isles." Jane turned her gaze back to the X ray, to those three parallel nicks on the cheekbones. She tried to imagine what could have left such a mark. It was a tool that neither she nor Maura had encountered before.

Fierce-looking, a coal-eyed brunette with a gaze direct as lasers. She

But human anatomy and human endurance are variable. While the much younger nun had succumbed to her injuries, Ursula's heart kept beating, her body unwilling to surrender its soul. Not a miracle, merely one of those quirks of fate, like the child who survives a fall from a sixth-floor window, and is only scratched.

We're all struggling to stay upright, Maura thought. Resisting the pull of temptation,just as we fight the pull of gravity. And when we finally fall, it's always such a surprise.

I think of myself as a fairly logical, scientific and somewhat reserved person. Maura Isles, the Boston medical examiner who appears in five of my books, is me. Almost everything I use in describing her, from her taste in wine to her biographical data, is taken from my own family. Except I don't have a serial killer as a mother!

In memory of Jim Heacock "In thy face I see the map of honor, truth, and loyalty." - William Shakespeare Henry VI, Part III

Because my dad's Chinese-American, and they're very concrete, he said, 'There's no money to be made in literature.' So he told me to go into the sciences. And I was a good girl. And I did what Daddy said. And that's how I ended up being a doctor. But you know, you just can't stamp out that desire to tell stories.

Throughout most of my life, I've tried to downplay my Chinese heritage because I wanted so much to be an American. I was the only Asian kid in my elementary school, and I longed to be like everyone else. I insisted on American food; I was embarrassed by my mother's poor English.

I met my husband, Jacob, in medical school. We married and went to live in Hawaii where his family lived. It was very beautiful, but I wasn't used to being on an island and needed wide open spaces. Eventually we moved to Maine, New England.

No kiss, no embrace, could bring two people any closer than we are right now. The most intimate emotion two people can share is neither love nor desire but pain.

Fans are always asking me where I get my ideas from. The answer is that I'm very curious, and I get inspiration from everywhere. I read the newspapers voraciously, so I know what's going on in real crime. I pay attention to the strange stories people tell me, and I also read a lot of scientific and forensic journals.

In 'Last to Die,' three children living in different cities are the only survivors when their families are slaughtered. Two years later, their foster families are murdered, and these three orphans are once again the only survivors.

Since my romance novels had all been thrillers as well, it wasn't such a leap for me to move into the straight thriller genre. The most difficult part, I think, was being accepted as a thriller writer. Once you've written romance, unfortunately, critics will never stop calling you a 'former romance author.'

The best heroes in the world are the reluctant ones. Courage isn't fearlessness - it's acting in the face of fear.

How far have we strayed from our essential natures. Just the sight of blood can make some men faint, and people scurry to hide such horrors from the public eye, hosing down sidewalks where blood has spilled, or covering children's eyes when violence erupts on the television. Humans have lost touch with who, and what, they really are.
Some of us, however, have not.
We walk among the rest, normal in every respect; perhaps we are more normal than anyone else because we have not allowed ourselves to be wrapped and mummified in civilization's sterile bandages. We see blood, and we do not turn away. We recognize its lustrous beauty; we feel its primitive pull.
Everyone who drives past an accident and cannot help but look for the blood understands this. Beneath the revulsion, the urge to turn away, throbs a greater force. Attraction.
We all want to look. But not all of us will admit it.

A project like 'Rizzoli & Isles' is something you can't pursue. It's something that comes to you ... I like to call it 'fairy dust.' And it happened without my having to do anything.

Be aware every morning that you may not last the day, And every evening that you may not last the night.

My brother often complains to me about the 'angry Asian male' in the United States. As a female, I haven't encountered this, but Asian-American men are angry. They're angry because, for so many years, they've been neglected as sex symbols. Asian women have it much easier, I think; we're accepted into various circles.

Alzheimer's is literally killing us, and the only way to fight this 'crime' is through a groundswell of people who continue to raise their voices and funds to ensure it gets the attention it deserves.

I was always meant to be a writer. I've felt that way since I was a child.

I shy away from showing cruelty on the page. A lot of the violence in my books actually happens off stage. The police come on to the scene after the event has occurred.

I have minor characters who are Asian-American, and I've been using them throughout my career, but they've never taken center stage, they've never been really powerful, they've never expressed some of the experiences I had growing up in the U.S. Johnny Tam is the first one.

Death does not discriminate; whether saints or sinners, in the end, all are equal.

There are hazards to every job, just like there are hazards to getting up in the morning. Driving to work, walking to the mailbox. Boarding a plane... The surprise isn't that we die. The surprise is how and when we die.

ADD has turned into a catchall for all childhood misbehavior. When a student's failing in class, or he gets into mischief,

What happens when we get old? he wondered. Where does the kid part of us go?

She pressed her fingers to the woman's neck and felt icy skin.
Bending close to the lips, she waited for the whisper of a breath, the faintest puff of air against her cheek.
The corpse opened its eyes.

Why do we always treat kids like the enemy?" "Because they so often behave like an alien species?

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

There's that unpredictability factor, that chance that something completely unexpected - something amazing - could happen. That's what makes life an adventure. Sometimes you just have to jump in and trust the universe.

The human mind was expert at filling in missing details and confidently turning them into facts, even if those facts were merely imagined.

It's not the size of the dog in the fight but the size of the fight in the dog.

Because I never plan anything out ahead of time, I'm always in the process of learning about my characters. Without a biographical sketch to guide me, I discover things about my heroines as the stories unfold. Only in 'Body Double' did I discover that Maura's mother was a serial killer.

'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.

No man easily admits that he is afraid.

Mom and I often talked about the trip we'd someday take together to the 'city of eternal spring' where she was born. In Kunming, she said, the fruits are sweeter, the mountains look like Chinese paintings, and the weather is always perfect.

She had never paid much attention to the heart beating in her own chest. As she watched the pattern traced by Korsak's, she became aware of her own pulse. She had always taken her heartbeat for granted, and she wondered what it would be like, to hang on every beat, fearful that the next might not come. That the throb of life in her chest would suddenly go still.

God, it's like reality's completely shifted on me. I used to think I was standing on such solid ground. If I wanted something badly enough, I just worked like hell for it. Now I can't decide what to do, which move to make. All the things I counted on aren't there for me anymore.

We dream our dreams, and sometimes they take us to places we never anticipate. But they are our dreams, and we go where they lead.

Aside from the Rizzoli & Isles books, there are many other stories I want to write. The question is whether I'll live long enough to write them all!

Parenthood is nothing but doubts.

I believe that every experience, every wrong decision, teaches us something. That's why we shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes.

Beware the ignorant, Lorenzo. They're the most dangerous enemy of all, because they are everywhere.

The bush is not merely a holiday destination; it's where you learn how insignificant you truly

Some people make choices hoping for the best; Korsak had made a choice simply to avoid the worst.

All those mounted heads in the living room," said Jane. "And he ends up hanging, like some dead animal. I'd say we've got a theme going here.

meat comes from the supermarket, where it's wrapped in plastic. No guts involved.

One of the best Christmas presents I ever got was the globe that I now keep right beside my desk.

Medicine is probably one of the best backgrounds for a writer to find stories. I always think cops and docs have the best background because we see so much of human behavior, such a range of human emotions.

Your blood reveal your most intimate secrets. Are you dying of leukimia or AIDS? Did you smoke cigarette or drink a glass of wine in the last few hours? Are you prozac because you're depressed, or Viagra because you can't get it up?

IF INDEED THESE VARIOUS ATTACKS IN DIFFERENT STATES ARE LINKED, then we're dealing with a set of highly complex ritual behaviors," said Dr. Lawrence Zucker. A criminal psychologist who served as consultant to Boston PD,

That is exactly what I learned. That evil can be so ordinary.

I think what medical training does is it gives you the language, the tools to look up facts. I think medical training gives you a sense of how to approach a problem, how to look at symptoms and go down the list of what it might be.