Quotes from Thomas Perry

the sort of books that cost too much unless you got them free.

When you're dead, the way death got you is just one thing that happened among thousands. You don't care more about that day than any of the others, just because it was the last day. You'll see.

Then he gave thanks as the Senecas always had, to the whole universe beginning with the ground at their feet and moving upward and outward. He thanked the earth, the waters, the fish, the plants, the edible plants, the medicinal herbs, the animals, the trees, the birds, the four winds, the thunders that bring rains, the sun, the moon, the stars, all spirit messengers, and the Creator.

he woke up one morning and realized that the conditions he had been accustomed to seeing as permanent had changed. He was no longer at the center of things. After his wife died the house had gone silent. It wasn't the hearth where the clan gathered for warmth and sustenance anymore. It was just a solitary man's place.

All dogs wanted to be good dogs, no matter how unpromising they seemed. You just had to help them find a way. And they were sunshine creatures. When their master opened his eyes in the morning it was their signal that the day had begun, and a day was to be greeted with joy and intense interest. They were a good example for an old man.

he's shitting in tall cotton

That way everybody has time to get something to eat before we start. I've found it makes them less peckish.

Her mother had not told Jane that happiness was not something she had waited for, but something she had decided.

They were all living right where they said they would to be.

He liked her stories for the same reason she told them—they should have happened.

thought she was his beard, but she was

He had spent forty years noticing that when women cut their hair short, other women would say it was "cute" or "smart" or some such thing, but he had never, in any of the thousand times when he'd seen it, heard anything approaching approval by any male.

They sent her to the fourteenth floor, which Elle knew was always the thirteenth mislabeled for the people whose idea of the borderline between reality and nonsense was flexible.

Marriages were more fragile and complicated than she had ever imagined. Trouble came in quiet, unexpected ways. Things had to be said over and over again, all existing agreements renewed and clarified.

The meal was two and a half hours of indulgence. Gallimard had chosen common, traditional dishes for them, but each dish was the response to this challenge, an implied promise that this would be the best sole, the best duck they would ever have. The dessert would be the one they felt wistful about someday when they couldn't have dessert.

celadon vase

Whatever the two may once have been in their country, they were now just a pair of overconfident strangers in a place where they couldn't find their way to a bathroom on their own.

Some people are born where they belong, and some have to find their way there," said Alma Rivers. "There's no difference after that.

At Disneyland they charge you as an adult when you're ten.

They didn't speak, only touched and kissed, feeling the understanding that they loved each other deeply and permanently—that for him, she was the one woman who would stand in his life for all women, and in her life, he would stand for all men.

People who like to hurt you can always tell you why it's your fault.

There was no such thing as a prayer of supplication in the old religion, only ways of giving thanks.

There was esoteric knowledge to being a burglar—broad areas that took some thought and skill. There was choosing the house, entering the house, and finding the items that were worth taking. Elle Stowell was good at all three.

had gone to Europe and always told people they were Canadian to avoid political hatred. Everybody liked Canadians.