Quotes from Nevada Barr

jealousy was not about caring, it was about fear of loss: loss of love, loss of power, or loss of security.

There are no policemen in an anarchy, only soldiers.

Before she'd had to deal with it, complaints about the one- to two-second delay before words said on one end trickled into an ear on the other had struck Anna as frivolous. Not so. She was amazed at how seemingly small a thing could cripple conversation.

Mr. White, Heath's sixth-grade teacher, once told the class that hatred wasn't the worst emotion; the worst emotion was indifference. She'd not understood what Mr. White meant until this night.

Criminals were a lazy bunch. If they weren't, they'd get their MBAs and rob with impunity.

Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.

everybody's got ten good reasons to do away with everybody else. It's just nobody knows how. Do 'how.

A cipher, Anna thought, one of those people who by choice or genetics is incapable of stirring up much emotion.

Much of her life, Anna had worked in a male-dominated world. She would defend the right of any woman to do the same, but she was realist enough to admit women made things more complicated, more volatile. Not because women were stupid or incompetent but because their presence often made men stupid and incompetent.

What's the use of being given a load of manure if you don't spread it around?

It crossed her mind to take the pledge, go on the wagon, but she couldn't decide which was worse: pending alcoholism, or remorseless unrelenting sobriety of the rest of her days.

In the sane world, criminals could be negotiated with, threatened, bought off. For the most part they were rational folks just suffering from poor impulse control, arrogance or lack of moral rectitude. In an insane world, what was negotiable, threatening, legal tender? Where monsters be, monsters' rules are law and only the monster knows what they are.

Man was the animal who created. Like the God in whose image he was supposedly made, he created his own heaven and his own hell.

In a culture dominated, if not by violence, then certainly by overheated reports of it dished out by a ratings-starved news media, it reassured her that the love of peace and natural order was still extant in the human soul.

She struck Darden as the kind whose corpse would kick you three days after you shot her.

Rape was about violence, hate and dominance. Sex had little to do with it.

EMTs learned to love brave patients--they weren't nearly such a pain in the ass as the whiners--but not to trust them. In the name of courage, they would hide symptoms, not ask for help when there was help hovering around them anxious to give them succor...

Anna'd been born female, she'd grown into a small woman and, in the past ten years, had slid into middle age. If ever there was a cloak of invisibility, time and circumstances were trying to weave her one.

Since joining the National Park Service fourteen years ago, Anna had worked every Fourth of July. ... Winding her way through the masses, trying not to get her fragile frame jostled, she realized she preferred it that way. Working on holidays, one wasn't required to have fun. There was no pressure, no disappointments. And she usually had a wonderful time.

My life is a Stephen King novel," she whispered. "Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can't get any worse, everybody dies.

The misery embedded in the house wasn't static. It lived and grew. Anna could feel it like a fungus on her skin. The touch of the sun burned it away.

buildings ravaged by the violence of those who lived there, reflecting it back on the residents. Homes of people too mentally ill to care for themselves or their property.

The place was a mausoleum. Anna was reminded of Great Expectations, of the old woman in her decaying wedding dress presiding over a feast long go eaten by mice and worms.

Soon she was going to have to relinquish her self-image as a hermit.