Quotes from Lisa Gardner

originally walked away from material possessions because I felt the weight of them dragging me down. Now I don't own anything I can't afford to lose because I don't want to die one day trying to protect something I never should've cared about in the first place.

She automatically shifted her stance sideways, making herself less of a target, as she approached the front of the worn-looking convenience store.

Is that what you lose over time? Not so much a loss of affection, as a slow clouding of your own sight? We became less and less focal points for each other, and more like pieces of furniture to maneuver around in the course of everyday life.

Maybe Stoney has a thing for strays. Or maybe, like most bartenders, he recognizes a lost soul when he sees one.

My primary concern is the area's crime stats. Half a dozen stabbings a week, not to mention the monthly shootings and annual homicide rate. Gang activity mostly, but predators are predators and as a middle-aged woman I'm not particularly intimidating.

Hand still on her holster, she tucked herself beside the ice coolers and peered through the open door.

In this day and age, we all talk too much and hear too little. Listening has become a forgotten art that the world is sorely missing

Leave it to Massachusetts to create a gun policy so paranoid that even when you took the proper legal steps no one believed you.

think of this often, drifting from community to community, always being the stranger and never the neighbor. People all over really are the same. They want to fall in love. They're glad to survive each day. They pray their children will have a better life than they did. These truths bind

In the past week or so, she was noticing some minor pains, small episodes of shortness of breath. Probably because she had a fairly decent-sized lifeform hanging off her spine, pummeling her lungs, playing soccer with her bladder. You know, the usual baby games.

She tucked closer to the wall making herself less of a target.

The world would be a better place if more people spent time drinking cheap coffee in church basements.

Basically, even good people do really bad things if they think no one cares. The banality of evil.

wish I had an answer for her. Something simple like Because, or poignant, such as Every child deserves to be found, or defiant, like Why not? But the truth is, she's probably heard it all by now. A whole torrent of words and reasons. Instead of being given the one thing she wants most: answers.

How many infants are born each day - innocent, sweet, boundless - only to be ruined by the very people who have given them life?

There's power in humility. It's one of the toughest lessons I've had to learn. Like the other souls in this room, I live on unsteady ground. Each moment is a choice and for all my good choices, I'm a single mistake away from having to start my journey all over again.

Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler. Pretty much any detective on the job loves a good puzzle.

Securing permission is not always this easy. I've been thrown out of homes. Had beer bottles tossed at my head, vicious threats spewed in my face. For some, rage is easier to handle. And many families do have secrets to hide.

It's not easy, though, being brilliant. Nor being married to one.

The kind of kid who is meant to suffer for the first twenty years or so, but then would take his software company public at age twenty-one and wind up married to a supermodel and driving a Ferrari.

You gotta love New Englanders. We can take anything we don't want to face, whitewash it resiliently into a faint echo of itself, then simply lock it away.

First order of business: downloading and installing the Pasco forensic tool from Foundstone.

how many episodes of being "not yourself" do you get before people figure out this is who you really are?

I am my demons, and my demons are me.