Quotes from John Sandford

California is like a Nazi state with palm trees

stopped by the door

We'll have set back New York heroin dealing by at least an hour and only cost the American taxpayers a couple of million.

Women had been on the verge of taking over the world—the Western world, anyway. Then some sexist pig in Silicon Valley invented the cell phone and women took a sidetrack on which all four billion of them would soon be happily talking to each other twenty-four hours a day, getting nothing else done, and Men Would Be Back.

She had eyes that Rembrandt would have painted.

Scratching their nails on the blackboard of futility.

Her voice was stark as a winter crow.

You know anything about farms?" "Worked on one, up in Marshall," Virgil said. "One of the big corporate places owned by Hostess. Harvest time, I'd be out picking Ding Dongs and Ho Hos—we didn't do Twinkies; those were mostly up along the Red River. We'd box them up, ship them off to the 7-Elevens. Hard work, but honest. I used the money to buy BBs, so I could feed my family. Most of the local workers have been pushed out by illegals, now.

You mean, we should only beat up young people?" Davenport asked. "There are as many old assholes as there are young ones. Especially since the boomers got old.

Flowers wouldn't be buttering their toast after the next election, but Pweters might be.

Women are basically recreational areas, with several separate facilities available at any given time.

I mean, the guy could fall in a barrel of titties and come out suckin' his thumb.

So what killed him? Virgil asked. I'm thinking aliens. You mean like, Canadians?

Why bother to go through life if you can't do interesting shit?

I'm not a responsible human being before noon. I don't daylight; I really don't.

Everyone should have a hippie painter anarchist in their lives. It's the guys in silvered aviators with guns that you've got to be wary of.

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

Death had a strange effect on the left-behind people. Some found peace and a new life; some clutched the death to their breasts.

The ME's investigator and the crime-scene people began consulting about the removal of Peck's body. The investigator told Virgil, "She didn't eat him much, but she did crush his head like an English walnut." Jenkins

This boy's been married so often he's got rice burns on his face.

My problem with that is I don't believe God cares what we do. Everything is equally relevant and irrelevant to God. A religion is nothing more than a political party organized around some guy's moral views, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, like conventional political parties are organized around some guy's economic views.

When I told my father I wasn't going to be a minister of any kind, he said that I should never take cover in life, that I should stand out in the wind. Feel it. I'm trying to do that.

O'Dell's driver was a broad man with a Korean War crew cut, his hair the color of rolled steel. A hatchet nose split basalt eyes, and his lips were dry and thick: a Gila monster's.

Shrake asked. "I'm sweating like a blind lesbian in a sushi bar.