Quotes from Nevada Barr

No wonder man was always out to conquer Nature, Anna thought. He can't bear it that she doesn't love him, or even hate him. She simply doesn't give a damn.

The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent.

Rogelio has a feminine side," Anna countered. "From what you've told me, Rogelio has a weak side. Not at all the same.

In the end Christina may have been sorry she asked Anna along. To Alison's great delight, Anna's expert advice was two kittens, so they could play together when she was away at the sitter's all day.

burned so fast and hot the perfect shapes of the leaves were still embossed on the ash.

Evil, true evil, in her—and, more scientifically, her psychiatrist sister's—belief, fed on despair, the kind that suffocates every glimmer of light and life beneath a cold so intense it becomes darkness.

A thousand "tells" were broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all. The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two. The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings, geese walking on one's grave, deja vu.

Women could sit with grief, hold its hands, watch it pour from the eyes of friends and children, lie down beside it and help it to rest. Their delicate strength would weave a net strong as spun steel, keep the widow Castle from hitting bottom.

The light that remained was of the clear gray quality that reminds one that the sky is not a blanket of blue benevolently spread over the earth but only the beginning of cold and impossible distances

A person's passion told a lot about who they were. Those without passions seemed to have a hollow place inside. One never knew what grew in that darkness.

perhaps love was like the mumps. If a woman came down with it after forty, it could kill her

Deliberately, she took a long drink. It wasn't as good as she remembered, but then little was. She caught herself in that thought and was ashamed. Cynicism was okay, bitterness a pain in the neck. The hairline difference between the two was hope and humor. The cynic had both, the embittered, nothing.

Anna remembered her fifth grade teacher, Mr. White, telling her that hatred wasn't the worst of emotions. If one hated, one still cared. Indifference was the most inhuman.

Anna… envied Joan's deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she'd been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider.

She was forty before she realized that when she asked a man what he was thinking and he said, "Nothing," he wasn't lying.

From long experience she knew that she wore her loneliness like armor. Very few people ever recognized it for what it was. To the casual observer it looked very much like arrogance. Sometimes it was.

My definition of forgiveness is a sigh, very like a sigh of relief, on which the memory of evil is breathed out. With letting go of the memory, discontinuing the incessant replaying of pain, and instead feeling the unmitigated overness of the evil, the evildoer often looks quite different: flawed, like me, a child of God, like me. Forgiven, like me.

When she finally found her way onto the Trace, the sun was rising and, with it, her spirits. The Natchez Trace Parkway, a two lane road slated, when finished to run from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, had been the brainchild of the Ladies' Garden Clubs in the South. Besides preserving a unique part of the nations past,...the Trace would not be based on spectacular scenery but would conserve the natural and agricultural history of Mississippi.

Hers was an evil-sounding chuckle that Anna loved. The sort of chortle Dorothy might have heard shortly before all hell broke loose in the land of Oz

As she drove the Trace, each curve revealing a scene rich with life and as picturesque as illustrations from a children's book, Anna was struck again by the beauty of the state. Over her years as a Yankee and a Westerner, she'd heard Mississippi described many ways. Beautiful had never been one of them.

In a world that is becoming increasingly virtual, the parks remain places of visceral beauty. Places where we can remember that we are but a small part of the life on this planet, and that it is a truly wonderful planet and the only one we've got.

when she was a young woman she valued intelligence over all other human attributes. Now that she was older she valued kindness.

you use your whole body like you did when you played as a kid. Grown-up amusements don't allow for crawling and wriggling, getting good and muddy, and tearing the knees of your pants.

she couldn't decide which was worse: pending alcoholism, or remorseless unrelenting sobriety of the rest of her days.