Quotes from Sara Gran

I never met an addict who came from a nice home . I've met addicts that came from families that had money and nice houses. But never from a nice home.

It doesn't matter what people want to hear. It doesn't matter if people like you. It doesn't matter if the whole world thinks you're crazy. It doesn't matter whose heart you break. What matters is the truth.

Be grateful for every scar life inflicts on you. Where we're unhurt is where we are false. Where we are wounded and healed is where our real self gets to show itself. That's where you get to show who you really are

Because this, for better or worse, is exactly where the truth lies--at the intersection of the forgotten and the ignored, in the neighborhood of all we have tried to forget.

Never be afraid to learn from the ether...That's where knowledge lives before someone hunts it, kills it, and mounts it in a book.

What we think is impossible happens all the time.

Did I really think it was wonderful? Wonderful was probably an exaggeration. I thought it was fine. Maybe even good. I couldn't say the last time I thought anything was exactly wonderful. That implied more joy than I may ever have felt.

People think live is, you know, this spiritual thing, the lama said. This 'feeling'. But that's not my thing. In my book, love is physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they're in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone when they don't call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.

The detective thinks he is investigating a murder or a missing girl. But truly he is investigating something else altogether, something he cannot grasp hold of directly. Satisfaction will be rare. Uncertainty will be your natural state. Sureness will always elude you. The detective will always circle around what he wants, never seeing it whole. We do not go on despite this. We go on because of it.

We all want to be someone else. And sometimes we succeed in convincing ourselves we can be. But it doesn't last, and our true selves, broken and scarred, always win out in the end.

There are no coincidences, only mysteries that haven't been solved, clues that haven't been placed. Most are blind to the language of the bird overhead, the leaf in our path, the phonographic record stuck in a groove, the unknown caller on the phone. They don't see the omens. They don't know the signs.

WE COULD devote our lives to making sense of the odd, the inexplicable, the coincidental. But most of us don't, and I didn't either.

There's nothing that isn't worth writing about. If you look closely at your life you'll find plenty to write about there, too.

Happiness is the temporary result of denying the knowledge one already has.

Those who try to grasp on to the mystery will never succeed. Only those who let it slip their fingers will come to know it, and hear its secrets

Most friends had fallen away over the years. Either they'd started avoiding me, as if my grief and bad luck were contagious, or I'd started to avoid them, unwilling to give them the chance to disappoint me. Besides, too much time around normal people made me feel like an alien, unwanted and ugly, fluent in a different language.

People thought money would make them happy. But money was the consolation prize in life. Money was what you had left to dream for when all the other dreams died. Money was what would keep you going when nothing else could delight you again.

Omens change. Signs shift. Nothing is permanent.

You cannot follow another's footsteps to the truth, Silette wrote. A hand can point the way. But the hand is not the teaching. The finger that points the way is not the way. The mystery is a payless land, and each detective must cut her own trail through a cruel territory. Believe nothing. Question everything. Follow only the clues.

I was glad I wasn't pretty anymore. It was so much easier to do things like this without being pretty.

I wasn't only sad--I was angry. I still felt lost in a dark, terrifying maze. And I was furious at the world for leaving me here.

Usually people avoided mentioning Abel's name, as if he'd done something unforgiveable. Which I guess he had: He reminded people of the cruel unfairness of life, and the closeness of death.

I think it's your civic obligation to be utterly fucking furious about politics.

Each was over fifty and poor, probably homeless, wearing clothes that hadn't been washed this year. They were the same type of man you could see in any city in America, in a little park or square just off downtown, halfway to skid row. I think they started making them after the Civil War; fighters who'd lost their wars and lost their fight. Even when their side won, they lost.