Quotes from Dana Stabenow

People who read are never strangers.

The blogosphere rewards no-holds-barred smartassery.

When you betrayed someone, you didn't just betray them, you betrayed your families, your community, an entire way of life.

The beating of the drums, which had seemed so monotonous, now took on the sound of a heartbeat, a deep, steady, reassuring throb that seemed to beat up through the soles of his shoes. The chanting went up above the beat, below it, swirled around it, now joyous, now mournful, sometimes a little teasing, maybe even a little mischievous. He couldn't tell where

Easy equation. No jobs, no people. No people, no kids. No kids, no schools. No schools, no community. No community, no jobs, and the snake eats its tail and consumes itself.

Libraries are what keep us a step ahead of the apes.

Ultimately, it will help ensure that more of what you like to read will be written. Thank you.

ALSO BY DANA STABENOW

in the grave / Dana Stabenow.—1st ed. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-312-55913-7 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-4299-5038-1 (e-book) 1. Shugak, Kate (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women private investigators—Alaska—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 4. Alaska—Fiction. I. Title. PS3569.T1249R47 2012 813'.54—dc23 2011037662

We mushrooms are used to being kept in the dark and fed shit three times a day.

ability to answer their own questions… Gradually, they acquire a skill shared by the greatest scholars in the world: the ability to educate themselves…

There was nothing of either fire or ice in it; only a tepid warmth, like lukewarm water that when you first stepped in felt comfortable to the skin, but if you stayed in too long would slowly sap the life from mind and body, leaving you numb, spent, incapable even of the few strokes necessary to keep your head above water.

loading a plate with steak and bread and a slab of meatloaf as thick as a Diana Gabaldon novel

biologists figure is why the crab stocks took such a dive in the mid-eighties." Jack examined his greasy fingers with rapt attention before beginning

the town. These people were

You don't play, you can't win.

He'd found her weeping one day the previous week, huddled over a much-thumbed copy of a mystery, one of a series. In this one the heroine's lover had died. She took it as a personal affront—"I can't believe she did that! How could she do that?"—and threw the book across the room, only to retrieve it a moment later and force him to listen to her read the death scene out loud.

The last thing she saw was the bottom of a spade coming straight for her head.

He told me patience was the most important thing when you wanted something. He told me not to rush, that rushing just got you nowhere faster.

was taught to give back. In the village, the old way, the right way, the one way is to give back, always somehow, in some way to give back.

sartorial splendor with a long, speculative survey