Quotes from John Sandford

in Yiddish or Hebrew-Russian-English or whatever: the word's nudnik. The best definition I've ever heard came from an Israeli professor of archaeology: "It's a person who is like a woodpecker sitting on your head, all the time pecking you.

I'm talking to a guy who says he was taken up in a flying saucer and had sexual experiments done on him - which, I got to say, is probably the only sexual experiments he's ever had done on him, that didn't involve a heifer.

love of money is the root of all evils.' Timothy, six-ten.

Virgil had read once that Grandma Moses was a primitive painter because she thought snow was white. The writer said if you really looked at it, snow was hardly ever white. It mostly was a gentler version of the color of the sky - blue, gray, orange in the evenings and mornings, often with purple shadows. When he looked, sure enough, the guy was right, and Grandma Moses had her head up her ass.

ANSON PALMER'S STREET was a working persons' street, not many people around midday. Lawrence had pushed her hair up under a baseball cap, walked up the driveway, around Palmer's car to the back door. She knocked on it, and waited.

the points of view of a lot of people I'd opposed at the start. That the Vietnam War was a waste

By Christmas, like most freshmen, he was done with religion, and he mooched around campus with a copy of The Stranger under his arm, hoping to impress women with long dark hair and mysteries that needed to be solved.

You tell him about this Hatchet, and answer any questions he has, and then you eat the paper with the phone number on it, flush three times the next time you use the toilet, and then shoot yourself

BACK IN THE TRUCK Virgil said, "Jesus, I thought I'd stepped into old home week." "Hey, Dog Butt is a good band," Johnson said. "Tight. They got two lead singers, a man and a woman, taking turns, and honest to God, you can boogey your ass off.

And there's already a cop writer in the Cities." "Mostly that one guy," Lucas said. "Whatshisname. But his cop never does any paperwork. Or uses the can.

Ladies Nite E ery Nite." Virgil spent the next few seconds of his life wondering if the "v" had fallen off, been stolen for some reason, or was simply a scarce letter that the bar hadn't happened to have on hand.

Pilate screamed and pulled away from her and in that sliver of opportunity, Lucas shot him through the bridge of his nose. Then the screaming really got started.

The light was going out. The country was being invaded by people of inferior cultures and inferior races. The real, vital, white America was being submerged.

He dressed in dark sport coats over black golf shirts because, he thought, they made him look smaller. They didn't; they made him look like a hole in space.

Nobody should be allowed in the professional media without at least a year of statistics," she

He believes he's the only real soul in an ocean of puppets.

Interesting." He said it like computer freaks do when they're preoccupied. "What?" Lucas asked. He got a minute of silence, then: "This is an unusual collection," Kidd said. "When people create a porn collection, they almost always collect the pieces separately, because everybody's tastes are different. But here, every file was downloaded all at once. That's unusual.

scooter. Four more squads were double-parked farther up the street. As Lucas paused at the trash basket, disposing of the orange, a

at the end of a five-year round of silliness, decided he didn't want to be a four-time loser, so he stopped getting married

If it's criminal, it's either stupid or crazy. Stupid people usually have guns, crazy people always do. In a choice between stupid and crazy, first investigate the stupid, because stupid is more common than crazy. In many cases, stupid is also more dangerous than crazy. You could sometimes talk to crazy, but there's no dealing with stupid. None of the above is always true.

Virgil had never seen a purely ideological murder, Republicans being too cautious, Democrats generally being bad shots.

There are only four ways to move heat around: convection, conduction, transport, or radiation.

truth, that he wasn't involved in the murder, but Virgil wasn't yet ready to label him nope. After a moment, Virgil said, "I'm going to hold you to that. Don't mess with Justin.

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