Quotes from William Kent Krueger

You stuff your own closet full of skeletons and you wonder what kind of bones everyone else has stuffed away.

Although this explains the mysterious way Meloux seemed to have known he was coming, Cork still understands that the old Mide has a gift for such forewarnings. Meloux once explained it as a communication with nature that Cork himself could nurture if he was so inclined. "It is not a secret language," the Mide had said. "You need to quiet all the other voices in your head and listen.

The inquest proceeded smoothly, evidence showing that Cork had acted reasonably. But the county attorney, Warren Evans, who was a crony of Robert Parrant, asked Cork a question that tilted the whole world of the inquest. "Why did you shoot six times, Sheriff? Shoot even after the man was down?

A woman who can heal the afflicted? A girl who looks into the future and wrestles with what she sees there? Yet are these things more difficult to accept than that all of existence came out of a single, random moment when cosmic gases exploded?

Life, she thought. Always a clash of opposites. Was there ever any real end to that great conflict?

He'd [Cork] known Darla LeBeau since high school, when she was a cheerleader with long blonde hair, nice legs, and a lot for a boy to notice under her sweater.

there's going to be lots in this world you're going to feel bad about. Save your regret for the important things, okay?

He reached down and pulled something from the ground, then held it out in his hand so that we could see. "A toadstool?" I said. He shook his head. "A morel, tastiest mushroom there is. Been a long while since I went hunting morels. Here," he said to me. "Take this and go see if you can find any more along the river.

In a way, he was afraid that to let go of the grieving would be to let go of his father forever.

God's right here. In the dirt, the rain, the sky, the trees, the apples, the stars in the cottonwoods.

The culture of the Old West, if it ever really did exist, had been tamed and replaced by the uniformity of the Walmart–strip mall–McDonald's homogenizing of America. It was happening in Minnesota, too. Hell, it was happening everywhere in the world.

She'd been notoriously bad, had had a reputation among their Chicago friends for possessing a flair for the soggy, the lumpy, the burned.

Meloux closed his eyes, lifted his face to the sun, breathed deeply. "That is all of life," the old Mide said quietly. "What?" Stephen asked. "Letting go of the questions. Letting go of the fear that there will be no answers." "Will there be answers?" "What we believe we want is like knocking on a closed door. Better to open ourselves to what we have and what we know. The beauty of this moment.

good things are made even better when you share the story of how they came to be.

But I believe if you tell a story, it's like sending a nightingale into the air with the hope that its song will never be forgotten.

the most important truth I've learned across the whole of my life is that it's only when I yield to the river and embrace the journey that I find peace.

Maybe the dead have finally gone to rest." "They never do, Bo." He thought about the dead who were with him now and who always would be, and he knew Otter was right.

I was a sinner. I knew that without a doubt. But I was not alone. And the night was the accomplice of us all.

Far better, I believe, to be like children and open ourselves to every beautiful possibility, for there is nothing our hearts can imagine that is not so.

There was that name again, stumbling accidentally from his lips. As soon as it was out, it seemed to turn like a boomerang and hit his heart.

he was tall and lean, had hollow cheeks, thick pale lips, and a nose like a big ragged chunk of granite shoved into his face. His

An emptiness opened inside me that could have swallowed the whole universe.

I had been to visitations before and have been to many since and I've come to understand that there's a good deal of value in the ritual accompanying death. It's hard to say good-bye and almost impossible to accomplish this alone and ritual is the railing we hold to, all of us together, that keeps us upright and connected until the worst is past.

Long after dark, the moon rose, full. All the stars around it vanished as if the moon were a bucket that had scooped them up, filling itself to overflowing with their silver light.