Quotes from Joseph Finder

Well, you know, a wise man once said that one of the great tragedies of our century is that a man can live his whole life and never know if he's a coward or not." I smiled, held up a forefinger. "Russell told me that.

Horace, fecundi calices quem non fecere disertum?" He paused, and then translated. "Whom have flowing cups not made eloquent?

But Roger, whom she loved and admired and who was probably the smartest guy she'd ever met, handled stress like a typical man. Plus, he didn't like to talk about things. That was just his way. That was how he'd been brought up. She remembered once saying to him, "We need to talk," and he replied, "Those are the scariest four words in the English language.

a lie gets halfway around the world before truth has the chance to put its pants on.

I opened the car door; then, just to be thorough, I got out and knelt in front of the bumper. And found it, magnetically affixed to the back of the license plate. I pulled it off: a miniature GPS tracking device. A box about three inches by one containing a GPS receiver and a cellular modem. That little toy could transmit a vehicle's location over a cell-phone network.

I shrugged, put my hands up, and turned around, my back to Taylor. Bondarchuk scuffed into an orthogonal position to my left, just far enough away that I couldn't jump him.

Often? That's a relative concept when you're in here." He licked his lips. They were chapped, startlingly red against the snow white of his Methuselah beard.

I nodded sagely. "If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." Masur looked at me quizzically. "Dan Quayle said that," I added. Whether he actually did or not, I liked the quote.

You make Gifford Industries sound like some sort of two-bit Mafia-owned New Jersey garbage-hauling company." I thought of a few rejoinders—I'm just wired that way—but I held my tongue.

She rose as Leland came over to her desk and hugged her. He was tall and rotund, with arched bushy eyebrows and sagging jowls, a large head and rosy cheeks and a white crew cut. Those who met him for the first time found him physically intimidating, and indeed, in repose, he often wore an imperious expression, made even more threatening by his arched brows.

Ms. Heller," said the man, "if you can hear me, say something, will you?" "What do you want, I'm shouting!" Lauren said at the top of her voice. "Now I see it," one of the female voices said. "Like she's trying to talk. I don't know what she said." "I think she said 'Ow.

SHE FELT a hard pinch on her neck. "Hey!" she protested. Her eyelids flew open. The light was unbearably bright, just as painful, but everything was gauzy and indistinct, like there was a white scrim over everything. She wondered whether she'd fallen back asleep for several hours.

Gabe's room was as dark as a cave. He was asleep under the covers, a barely discernible lump.

It's better than the Green Line," Galvin said with a

Piazza Navona.

The man was remarkably . . . well, homely. Ugly, not to put too fine a point on it. His face was deeply pitted with scars, obviously the victim of a terrible case of adolescent acne. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had thinning brown hair, round shoulders, a pigeon chest.

That'll show them," I said, then realized that sarcasm was probably a bad idea at this point. "Come on, Gabe. You can't pay attention to jerks like this. You know what I always say—never let an asshole rent space in your head.

The pitch we used to convince companies to spend $50 million bucks for one of our planes was that it wasn't simply a means of transportation; oh no - it was 'a productivity tool'. It allowed an executive to make good use of his travel time and a relaxed and refreshed executive could seal the deal much more effectively than his travel-worn counterpart. Yeah, right. You can always justify any obscene luxury on the grounds of productivity...

Arthur Garvin's voice was hoarse and adenoidal. He sounded even worse than the day before.

When everything's coming your way, maybe you're driving in the wrong lane

It's like . . . if you surround yourself with good people, it makes you a better person. Brings out the best in you. Surround yourself with bad people, it brings out your worst.

He'd taken to the BlackBerry right away, even though he complained that his fingers were too thick for the Lilliputian keys.

When someone told Mark Twain that Andrew Carnegie's money was tainted, he said, it sure is—'tain't yours and 'tain't mine.

Turns out your brother's on the No Fly List." "No Fly List?" "Yep. You know, that new TSDB watch list." "TSDB?" I said, but I remembered the new acronym just before he said it. "Terrorist Screening Database.