Quotes from Thomas Perry

This was what the old gangster in the California prison had been trying to describe to Elizabeth Waring. The tape-recorder team in New York had managed to stumble on a man who had never done anything for a living except kill people. He had been doing it for, say, twenty years, and he had gotten pretty good at it.

They're drenched in orenda, the power of good in the world that fights against otgont, all the darkness and evil.

The sergeant opened the gun safe and put her belongings inside, as the nearly 150-year tradition of Weldonville demanded. Firearms had never been allowed in the city council chamber.

They'd be sitting somewhere out of sight waiting for him to turn the key and blow himself into a hundred thousand spoonfuls of hamburger.

I meant you can pick." "If

I love you' is what people say when they have run out of words and can't say anything else. It is like reaching out a hand in desperation.

Holy shit! It wasn't them; it was him!

Some people are born where they belong, and some have to find their way there

The women sang the Ohgiwe and danced together as the grandmothers had, for the brave, and the unselfish, for the protectors.

People take charge and then you find out what they wanted power for.

Her mother's voice began to hum to her softly, tunelessly. Jane whispered, "How did you come?" "I'm not out there anymore, Jane. I'm inside you now, and my mother is inside me, and her mother is inside her, all the way back. We're all here, just like those Russian dolls, one inside the other.

You may not have noticed, but men over retirement age seem to have a lot of clothes of an earlier vintage." "Yep," he said. "We're all timing it to wear them out at the moment of death so everything comes out even.

The big stone house under the maple

recovered completely from the gunshot. She

Question asked of Thomas Perry. What is the most important thing that you have learned in your writing experience, so far? "If any writer is going to be remembered after he's gone, it will be for the parts of his work that are absolutely original, and would never have existed if he hadn't written them. So if you're writing a scene that you've read, watched, or heard before, then you're wasting your time and your reader's.

When you don't know anything, imagining you know something certainly does cheer you up." "It's the way of the optimist.

two-bit hack politician who ran for

Jane reached Western New York in the dark. It had been a seven-hour drive, but she had stopped for meals and breaks, and then had taken time to sleep for two hours at a rest stop. The urgency she had been feeling since the night the ancient woman had come to her in her dream seemed to burn in her until she had worn herself out. Now she was feeling stronger.

Women had a way of dancing with the man who asked, and a lot of the natural-selection business that determined who was first in line, or even who considered himself worthy, got settled among the men themselves.

She didn't have enough patience to try to explain to Christine the proper way to think about money. Among the old people, a person's status had never been determined by how much wealth he could accumulate, but how much he brought back to give away.

It often seemed to Jake that wisdom had settled on his own head like a wreath from heaven some time around age sixty, after it was too late to do him much good and was more of an irritation than a pleasure.

fortuitous chance.

She had decided that the women wouldn't be wearing overly conservative, modest clothes. If a woman was up to no good, she would want to look like the majority.

The enemy in retirement was that nothing you did seemed to cause you to look forward to anything. Weekends were the same as weekdays, and payday was just a notice from your bank that the check had arrived as usual.