Quotes from Sue Grafton

So far, I felt like I had a lapful of confetti and the notion of piecing it all together to make a picture seemed very remote indeed.

Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right—a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five.

we understood the consequences of any given action, we could exercise discretion, thus restructuring our fate.

Whoever invented breakfast really did it good.

I didn't take the death-and-dismemberment talk very seriously. Where could you rent a chainsaw at this time of night?

If I were asked to rate my looks on a scale of one to ten, I wouldn't.

The louder he proclaims his honesty, the faster we count the silver.

The tricky part of any lie is trying to figure out how you'd behave if you were innocent.

Fifty percent of the local citizens are sympathetic and the other fifty are pissed as hell. Does the problem get solved? No, it does not.

I stood when she reached the table and we did that fake kissing thing, looking like a pair of budgies about to peck each other to death.

At heart, I've always been a pretty little moralist. Private investigation is just my way of acting out.

There's something inherent in human nature that has us constructing narratives to explain a world that is otherwise chaotic and opaque. Life is little more than a series of overlapping stories about who we are, where we came from, and how we struggle to survive. What we call news isn't news at all: wars, murders, famines, plagues—death in all its forms. It's folly to assign meaning to every chance event, yet we do it all the time.

As it is, we could not call mine a beautiful puss, but it does the job well enough, distinguishing the front of my head from the back.

I've given this a great deal of thought and what I've realized is that revenge doesn't have to be an eye for an eye. Retaliation can take any number of forms. It doesn't need to be crude or obvious. The point is, the pain should be equivalent; not tit for tat but something comparable.

You can't go back to something once it's dead.

I'm not saying justice is for sale, but if you have enough money, you can sometimes enjoy the benefits of a short-term lease.

It's not that gray water's boring, but the subject does have its limits.

If your mind isn't open, keep your mouth shut too.

Another one of life's little jokes. I thought it was a tumor 'til it started to kick.

I find it so liberating when other people are rude. It makes me feel mild and lazy and mean.

A lot of people were mistaken about a lot of things.

My own mystery, unplumed, undetected, was sorted into files that were neatly labeled but really didn't say much.

There were pieces missing yet but they would fall into place and then maybe the whole of it would make sense.

Ordinarily, an alibi is an account of suspect's whereabouts at the time a crime was committed and it's offered up as proof of innocence, but here it didn't matter where anyone was.