Quotes from Robert B. Parker

What I must do concerns me, not what people think.' 

I was doing curls. Hawk said, "How you and Susan doing?" "Love is lovelier," I said, "the second time around." "Worth the scramble," Hawk said.

Hawk drifted around behind me in $5000 worth of clothes earning his $150 a day. We saw nothing interesting. We

She's a sicko, Hawk." "Ah ain't planning to screw her psyche, babe.

When I'm stuck," Healy said, "I go over it." "All of it," Jesse said. "Start at page one of my notebook and go page by page all the way through.

She wore a lot of makeup, badly applied. There was lipstick on her teeth. If she'd been a dancer, it must have been in Fantasia.

It was 10:45. Across the continent Susan would be putting on her makeup now, and spraying some perfume on herself and making sure her hair was perfect. I looked at my reflection in the window. My hair wasn't perfect. Neither was I.

I read someplace that wanting to know everything about a person is wanting to possess them." "I believe that is probably true," Susan said.

Perhaps the one absolute essential to growing up well is being tough enough," Susan said. "Like us," I said.

I wonder why I'm so uneasy naked," she said. "Maybe it's the gimlet-eyed lechery of my gaze," I said. "Probably," she said.

Is he any good?" Susan said. "DeSpain. Yeah. He's a good cop. Very tough cop." "Too tough?" "Some people thought so," I said. "Tougher than you?" "Never a horse that couldn't be rode, little lady. Never a rider that couldn't be throwed." "Good heavens," Susan said. "Does that mean he might be?" "Means maybe we'll find out some day," I said.

You walked a mile in the rain to drink hot water?" "To be with you," she said. "You're better than pie." And I turned under the umbrella and embraced her with my free arm and pressed my mouth against hers and held her hard against me and smelled her perfume and closed my eyes and kissed her for a long time in the still rain, and even after

You ever read Machiavelli?" I said. "I imagine somebody mentioned him to me at Harvard." "He argued that it is better to be feared than loved," I said.

We maybe should ask him about that?" Suit said. "Sooner or later," Jesse said. "First, you want to get all your ducks in a row?" "I'd settle for getting them herded into the same area," Jesse said.

If doing the crime is proof of insanity, and sanity is a defense against conviction, then the crime is its exculpation, and no one is responsible for anything.

SUSAN AND PEARL and I were in bed together. I loved Pearl, but my preference had always been a ménage à deux. "At least she wasn't in here during," I said to Susan.

Corsetti pulled up and parked on 52nd Street in front of an apartment near the river. He put the cop light on top of the cruiser. "Keep the fucking traffic buzzards from hauling it off to the tow lot," he said.

He was probably stud duck at the Rotary Club cookouts. I could have taken him while whistling the Michigan fight song and balancing a seal on my nose.

Conversation between Susan's therapist and Spenser - And when you find her? Then what? Then she will be free again to come here and work with you until she can make the choices she wishes to make. And what if you are not that choice? I think I will be. But I can't control that. What I can do is see that she's free to choose.

And it's the reason I wanted you to live with me." "Not because I am cuter than a bug's ear?" "That too," Susan said. "But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.

Since when do you and I talk about the world," she said. "The world is what it is." "Yeah, I know." "Not only do you know, you've helped me to know." "Good to be useful," I said. "What has always made me respect you, even in the bad times, was your ability to look out at the world and see what's there. Not what you'd like to see, or even what you need to see, but simply what's there.

Tony's patois kept getting broader as we talked. Like Hawk, he seemed able to turn it on and off. "Sho 'nuff," he said.

off with Utley." We were all quiet then, Susan and I

Please send me a bill for your services through"—he looked at his watch—"through today," he said. "And you'll pay it with a rubber check," I said.