Quotes from Robert B. Parker

Afterlife is no less implausible than anything else,' I said. 'All explanations of existence are equally incredible.' 'So you might as well believe something that makes you feel good as not

If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.

if you lay back and let oblivion roll over you, it will be your fault.

She was wearing something in purple suede that was too short for a skirt and too long for a belt.

I'm entirely fascinated with you," I said. "And what you are is a result of what you were, including the other men.

it's better to be what I am than to be failing at what I am not.

Even in her cap and gown Susan looked like a sunrise, extravagant and full of promise. Wherever she went things seemed, as they always did, to organize around her.

Everything was elegant and cool, including Frederics, who was slicker than the path to hell.

Sartre claimed that hell is other people," I said. "He never saw no TV game show," Hawk said.

In the bank they did the same kind of stuff the fortune-teller and the bookie had done. But they dressed better.

The point is not to get hung up on being what you're supposed to be. If you can, it's good to do what pleases you.

But if I were a man," she said, "I imagine you wouldn't let me say it." "No," I said. "If I didn't need your help, I wouldn't let you say it.

Susan said. "Kindness is not dangerous. You have found a way to work and live which allows you to integrate the violence and the compassion. If you had no impulse to violence, your compassion wouldn't be so admirable. If you had no compassion, your violence would be intolerable. You understand what I'm saying?

Keep her origins a mystery.

We finished breakfast and got our luggage. Susan carried my small overnight bag. I carried her big bag, and her smaller one, and the one that contained her makeup, and one she referred to as the big poofy one, and a large straw hat she had worn to the beach, which didn't fit into anything. "Why don't you get a bellman," Susan said.

Are you trying to compromise my manhood?" I said. "Oh, yeah, that," she said. "Now and then I forget.

She leaned back a little in her chair and looked at me in silence for a considerable time. Finally she said, "Of all the banks, in all the world, you had to walk into this one." "We'll always have Cambridge," I said.

All the received truths of popular culture presume that successful love is rooted in shared interests. Dating services computerize preference, hobbies, vacations, and such so that they can match like with like.

I guess I mean that nature hates a vacuum. If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.

I took some time to evaluate them, and concluded that fashionable dress was heavily dependent on who was wearing it. I

Everyone froze. In real time the whole sequence had probably taken ten seconds. In the slow motion of crisis time it had unreeled in ponderous elegance, and the crystalline immobility that followed was intensified by the lingering smell of gunfire, like an olfactory echo of the big bang.

The Mass. Ave. Bridge is open... Some MIT students once measured it by repeatedly placing an undergraduate named Smoot on the ground and marking off his length. Every six feet or so there is still the indication of one smoot, two smoots, painted on the pavement. I could never remember how many smoots long the bridge was.

You look like … like a boxer, or like somebody in a Tarzan movie." "Cheetah," I said.

know. I've been in classes with her. She's bright, but she's screwed up. Jesus, they're so miserable, those kids, always so goddamn unhappy about racism and sexism and imperialism and militarism and capitalism. Man, I grew up in a tarpaper house in Fayette, Mississippi, with ten other kids. We were trying to stay alive; we didn't have time to be that goddamn unhappy.