Quotes from Karin Slaughter

So." Penelope slapped her hands on her thighs as she turned back to Lydia. "I was wondering if you could help me out." "Oka-a-ay." Lydia drew out the word to convey her great trepidation. This was how Penelope sucked you in. She didn't tell you to do things; she told you that she needed your help.

Her subway card was given to a homeless woman who had thanked her, then screeched that she was a fucking whore.

Your mother asked about his family, because we are southern and asking about someone's family is the only way we can distinguish the chaff from the wheat.

Her only question then had been, Why am I not enough? Now her only question was Why are you such a needy bastard? "I just needed a break," he told her, another old standard.

Ben Hecht said, "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell time by watching the second hand of a clock.

The world stops for you when you're pretty. That's why woman spend billions on crap for their faces. Their whole life, they're the center of attention. People want to be around them just because they are attractive. Their jokes are funnier. Their lives are better. And then suddenly, they get bags under their eyes or they put on a little weight and no one cares about them anymore. They cease to exist.

Gamma was an aggressively terrible cook. She resented recipes. She was openly hostile toward spices. Like a feral cat, she instinctively bristled against any domestication

that was more than love. That was being in love. It was so tangible I could almost touch it with my hands. I could bite it with my teeth.

of age. No distinguishing tattoos or birthmarks." He looked up, making sure he was being followed. "Five-ten

Here was the problem with Jack Reacher: he was a bad guy who sometimes did good things. Given his itinerant lifestyle, Will thought of him as an American James Bond—not the Bond from the movies but the Bond from the books who was one level up from a street fighter. There was no M to temper his feralness. Reacher did not have a legal license to kill. Or maim. Or shoot people in their knees, which was a really mean thing to do, even to a stone-cold gangster.

That man needs to build a bridge to get over himself.

There was nothing more vicious than a teenage girl. Maybe it was because boys were more capable of settling an argument with their fists, but girls at this age were much more conniving and torturous than anyone wanted to believe.

Some Other Dude Did It

Well." Lydia took a deep breath as she prepared to sing the hokey pokey of her life story, where she put the truth in, pulled a lie out, added an embellishment, and shook it all about.

According to a local news team investigation, response times to emergency calls from Grady averaged around forty-five minutes. An ambulance took even longer.

Helen didn't hold back. "I told your father that Paul was like a hermit crab. They're scavengers. They don't have the ability to make their own shells, so they cast around until they find abandoned shells, and then they move in.

Do you think anyone's watching background checks? Mass murderers buy machine guns and enough ammo to take down twenty schools and no one bats an eye.

He beat the shit out of you. That's not love.

Then again, he was born in the South, where babies drank Scripture with their mother's milk. "I

Moon was from somewhere up east, the kind of place where consonants took on a life of their own.

but she'd purposefully turn in a paper late or miss an assignment so she'd fall closer to the middle.

You can't throw a brick without hitting a heroin addict these days." She sighed. "If only we had more bricks.

The most expensive thing she had ever put on her face was a New York strip after a perp had punched her in the eye.

Lydia wondered how long it would take for Penelope to tell the other Mothers about the tragic death of Lloyd Delgado. Her father always said that the price for hearing gossip was having someone else gossip about you. She wished that he were still alive so she could tell him about the Mothers. He would've wet himself with laughter.