Quotes from C.J. Box

the Mount Rushmore KOA complex near

Larry didn't agree, but he didn't argue.

But a man didn't use a word like that except to demean. And he no doubt meant what he said. It hurt.

Sound bites in search of a paragraph...

she'd had enough face-tightening medical procedures to appear perpetually astonished.

The sound of the discharge within the cab was so loud, all Joe could hear was a dull buzzing in his ears.

Joe Pickett's

He knew he wouldn't sleep. Couldn't. The things Larry had told him swirled around the dark ceiling, darting in and out of his consciousness. He hoped strands of what he knew would somehow miraculously connect and he'd sit bolt upright with an epiphany and suddenly know the connections as well as the answers. Didn't happen.

They didn't stop to think that every item they ate or wore or used was likely transported across the nation in the trailer of his truck or those like him, or that the hardworking blue-collar rednecks they avoided in real life and despised on the road were the conduits of their comfort and the pipeline of their wealth.

The rhythms of the road were like rivers that flooded and receded in perpetuity.

Cassie knew Isabel's participation at Woodstock never happened, although she had no doubt her mother had come to believe it over the years. If all the people of her mother's generation who claimed to have been at Woodstock had actually been there, Cassie knew, the concert would have hosted millions more kids than were actually there. But there was no point in getting into that argument again.

In the darkened cab of his eighteen-speed Model 379 Peterbilt, the Lizard King was alone, quiet and still, the cab perched over 550 horses of steel muscle under the iconic squared-off snout.

After nightfall the face of the country seems to alter marvelously, and the clear moonlight only intensifies the change. The river gleams like running quicksilver, and the moonbeams play over the grassy stretches of the plateaus.… The Bad Lands seem to be stranger and wilder than ever.…—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman

and persuasive when what he really wanted to do was get going. He said,

In the darkened cab of his eighteen-speed Model 379 Peterbilt, the Lizard King was alone, quiet and still, the cab perched over 550 horses of steel muscle under the iconic squared-off snout. The truck was flat black, stripped of chrome, and as subtle as a fist.

like to see Clay McCann thrown in prison because he doesn't like the idea of a man getting away with murder in his state, despite the weird legal circumstances of this one.

His lightweight Taurus 738 TCP semiauto in .380 ACP. In an oblong, hard, and hinged box once used for sunglasses was a syringe filled with Rohypnol.

PART EIGHT —— DESERT SOLITAIRE The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Since that morning outside of Chicago the Lizard King had been planning the hunt. He'd awakened in his bunk thinking about it, and at breakfast he'd gone through his mental checklist. It had been several weeks, and he was due.

up' is from when a bird has eaten too much of his kill and doesn't want to hunt or do anything for a while," she said. "And 'under my thumb' and 'wrapped around his little finger' are from holding a falcon tight to your fist by its jesses so it can't fly. Those terms were in Shakespeare's plays and until then they weren't common usage.

of cash and apologized to his stepmother and half sisters for meeting

Our free enterprise system is broken and can't be fixed." The source said Templeton was angry and blamed the state of the economy on "untouchable elites" and "crony capitalists working hand-in-glove with corrupt politicians.

It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it. —Aung San Suu Kyi, "Freedom from Fear

He timed his routes to avoid as many weigh scales—called "chicken coops"—as possible and he'd rather use his piss-jug than be forced to stop at highway rest areas frequented by homosexuals known as "pickle parks.