Quotes from Nevada Barr

God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.

Dose it ever amaze and delight you that of all the places in the world - cold grassy nests under hedgerows, warm patches of sun on a carpet - the cat chooses to sit on your lap?

Anna took her solace where she always did. The smell of the earth, the touch of the sky held for her a special alchemy, able to turn loneliness into aloneness, and so make it, if not sacred, at least bearable.

By the time they reached the Queens Highway turnoff, Anna found she liked Sheila more in memoriam that she would've guessed.

Anna would stay, would watch. She would wait for an opening, a chance, then she would take it. Too many years rescuing lost hikers, mourning friends, and seeking justice for the dead had passed for her not to know she was, and always would be, her sister's keeper.

what we have done is unacceptable.

One of the reasons humans tended toward insanity was the weight of fear they carried. The blessings of storytelling, the handing down of knowledge and warnings, had a flip side. People carried the collective fears of their history, the biases of those long dead, the paranoias of other ages. Anna flashed

Words could hurt worse than any stone, and the bruises lasted longer. Harboring

Humans were herd animals, like the moose. Sometimes even the most independent needed to clump up, hip and shoulder touching, protecting their soft flanks from the wolves.

but he was big and, superwoman or not, Anna knew when all else was equal, big won. Young won. The point was to make sure all else was as unequal as possible.

Worry about right and wrong wasn't a concept he embraced. Right and wrong were ephemerals; they changed from every angle, from hour to hour, depending on which side of any of a thousand borders a soldier was born.

somewhat resemble Dickens's garbage sifter, who lived in a shack surrounded by mountains of refuse.

As a lover of the theater, Anna had been fascinated by what drove the human heart to self-destruct. That was over. Now all she cared about was that they be stopped.

don't want to come back as a seasonal interpreter," Anna said finally. Jenny looked crestfallen. "I don't blame you for that," Steve said. "Let me know when you'd like your last day to be and I'll get to work on the paperwork." "No, I'm staying," Anna said. "I want to come back in law enforcement.

All cats were divine till proven otherwise; all dogs were suspect until cleared.

paddock. "Will do," Anna said, feeling mildly miffed. In her mind she heard her tiny, mean, long-dead grandmother cackling: "Think you're so important? Put your finger in a bucket of water, pull it out and see how big a hole it leaves.

Days were growing short, clocks had long since been dialed back to daylight wasting time... (p62)

A lot of people went through life feeling they'd been ripped off. The money, the good jobs, the beautiful women, the rich husbands, had been snatched away from them, given to the wrong people.

Take my professional word for it: everybody's got ten good reasons to do away with everybody else. It's just nobody knows how.

shock of black hair. "Or are rangers' sex drives too low?" "IQs are too

It ain't gonna happen. You get a lot to learn about ranchers. We defend what's ours. From varmints and the goddam Park Service.

The shame attached to rape was men's shame, shame they were too weak to carry: that their gender could do this, that they could do it, that they wanted to do it, that they could not protect their wives and sisters and daughters from it, that they could not stop it. That a thing they believed to be solely theirs could be taken by another man. That, should a child be born, the cuckold would be left to raise another man's bastard.

Anna's illusion of control had been smashed years before with the sudden, meaningless death of her husband. In the years since, she'd made an effort not to give in to the need to put the pieces back together, but to see and know and accept with some degree of grace that life is meaningless. There is no Grand Plan. Everything doesn't happen for the best. One can knock till one's knuckles are bloody and the door may not be opened.

As a Park Ranger I will protect and serve you...But we'll never be friends. Is that going to be a problem? The tarantula stopped, its front pair of legs feeling the air.