Quotes from Laura Lippman

True, she never got a real M.B.A., but she had taken courses online and worked her way through list after list of so-called Great Books. She read the newspaper carefully. She was better informed on current events than almost anyone she knew. To have Sophie laugh at her, to throw her lack of formal education in her face— That

She's always late, except when we're late, and then she gives us unmitigated shit.

When destiny wants to fuck with you, it can afford to be patient. Destiny has all the time in the world. Anyway

She had thought: No, I was dead. Now I'm

Read The Ghost Writer and American Pastoral, then get back to me. What about your father?

Then the sun finally comes up, and such 3:00 A.M. thoughts are banished, as they should be.   She

One with a cubicle and a desk that snags your panty hose and endless memos about the right way to dispose of recyclables. And lots and lots of petty intrigue and small-minded politics, all intended to distract you from the fact that you're getting two percent raises from a company that's returning twenty percent to its stockholders. That's a real grown-up's job.

throwing out "I sorry" as if it were confetti, her private little parade of destruction rolling past, leaving Eliza to clean up all of the mess. They had tried hard to teach their children the importance of genuine remorse, what it was to say and mean "I'm sorry.

She pressed her fingertips against the glass and thanked him for his insight. Supermax

No one uses words correctly and if you call them on it, they claim that words are fungible, that it's oppressive and prissy not to let words mean whatever the speaker wishes them to mean.

We cannot imagine what we cannot see.

He turns on the radio and it's that goddamn song that's on the radio all the time this summer, the one about chasing waterfalls. No one chases a waterfall. You go for a swim and next thing you know, the current catches you and throws you right over.

A woman dies young, it's man trouble.

He has to know what she's saying is too good to be true. Good Lord, if this were the kindest way to break u with a woman, that would be the greatest thing that ever happened to men. Maybe she should write an advice book for men, one that tells them everything they want to hear, as opposed to all those books for women, which tell them to be the opposite of what they are, no matter what that is.

Who looks at a woman's elbows, you sick fuck?" "I'm just saying it's the one place that a woman can't hide her age. My wife told me. She lemons hers sometimes. Cuts a lemon in half, hollows it out, fills it with olive oil and kosher salt and sits at her vanity, arms up like a little bunny." Lenhardt demonstrated the pose. "I tell you, Kevin, it's like going to bed with a fucking tossed salad.

acceptable. Some people were just weird. Now anyone who seems the least bit off has to have a label, a diagnosis, be "on the spectrum.

Arthur Drysdale had come into the emergency room with a stab wound to his right thigh. He blamed the attack on a mysterious intruder, a home invasion in which nothing was taken. He said he came home to find a strange man in the house and the man grabbed a pair of scissors and jammed them into his leg.

Of course, as the book makes clear, it also owes much to Rear Window and The Daughter of Time, not to mention an article I wrote in 1998, about

Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child." Sunny

Kobe beef hamburger on the menu at Nasu Blanca—are

Maybe if you never marry a woman, she never becomes a wife.

literally. Unlike most people, even allegedly educated ones, he used

Where are you getting your material—Portnoy's Complaint?" "What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking

listen, you know? Girls. They don't listen. They're in too much