Quotes from Maureen Johnson

Something in the room had changed. My hand was on the floor, next to Stephen, but he wasn't as close to my hand as he had been. He had moved several inches over, toward the table. Just as I realized this, his arm shot out for the knife. In the next moment, he had rolled up on his knees and had Sadie caught in the crook of his arm. His face was pale, and he looked a bit shaken by the sudden movement. He was alive.

Therapy, she said. It works. I've tried it. They always end up crying. I think I've helped them have some real breakthrough moments.

Stevie's other big interest outside crime was disaster, so she had seen Titanic many times. It was clear to her that there was plenty of room on that door for two people. Jack was murdered.

Hello, Alice, Stevie said. It'd okay. It's over.

I live alone, Knud said, and I work alone, but I am never truly alone. I do my ancestor's work. I live the entire history of my country and people.

No, hear me out. This whole thing is ticking a lot of the horror movie boxes. Murder at a sleepaway camp. A serial killer. A final girl. A kid who died because some teenagers were being irresponsible.

Three: Izzy made it sound like Stevie was Wikipedia Holmes, a walking, talking, deducing database that ate true crime and spat out justice.

People can't really sympathize with you properly when you've woken them up

David had, in fact, done the Sherlock thing that Stevie had dismissed for herself, specifically, the BBC one. He was wearing a sharply cut blue dress shirt, slender, tailored pants, and a long gray-black coat with a red interior. He had teased out his hair a bit and made sure it curled. In many ways, it was a perfect costume while not being a costume at all. And it was obviously intentional, directed at her.

He was paying attention. It felt foreign, a little embarrassingly intimate, but kind of great. My eyes filled up.

Much as I would have liked to, I couldn't hide upstairs forever. Sooner or later, I was going to have to come down and face the world.

No one fixes the world alone.

In Vermont, there is maple syrup in it—it doesn't matter what it is. Cake. Ice cream. Coffee. Soup. Mustard. Concrete.

Which was precisely what I had to do. Go away. Get out of this house and his life while I still had a shred of dignity left.

People always talk about this like it's some lurid slasher movie," Allison went on. "I lost my sister. Some bastard took my sister from me. I feel like Carson used her memory, gave us that reading room, to try to worm his way in. He can go to hell. But I didn't mean to catch you in the crossfire.

The whole thing smelled like a thrift shop that had been baked in a low oven and felt like a too-tight and too-long hug by a rejected Muppet.

They were poets—machine-gun poets who brooked no compromise, who rode any road they wished, who drove laughing into the sun.

She wasn't as bad as Todd, as good as Sabrina, or the well-meaning drug dealer who almost made it to safety. She was simply there, the girlfriend, the fourth victim.

I get to live by myself in a tree, doing some bullshit job for no one? This is my dream, Stevie. This is my dream.

It's true. All the money, all the power - none of it compares to a good book. A book gives you everything. It gives you a window into other souls, other worlds. The world is a door. Books are the key.

Daughters were supposed to like prom dresses and getting their hair done and shopping. Stevie assumed those things were all fine and good, but she didn't understand them, really—at least not in the way that you were supposed to understand them. She never once in her life felt the desire to dress up

Oh, I like it," Nate said. "Snow makes it socially acceptable to stay in.

David had looked so beautiful that morning. The light came down on one side of his face and he seemed to glow. His dark hair fell in finger-length curls that flopped rakishly across his forehead. He had eyebrows that had natural peaks, raised in constant amusement. His nose was long and fine. His worn T-shirts pulled against his frame, revealing muscled arms. . . .

There was the thing about romantic feelings- the sensation was incredible, like a warm flood through every highway and byway of her body. Every good chemical she could produce turned up, like some bountiful harvest. But the feelings and chemicals blocked out everything else. They dulled logic and sense and focus. They made everything else seem irrelevant and time started to move jerkily too fast, then too slow