Quotes from Nevada Barr

Like many people who lasted any length of time in the rescue professions, she'd worn out the 'if' factor pretty quickly. You were where you were. You went where you went. You did what you could. Mostly, people were better off after you showed up than before.

Gossip, unless aimed or honed sharp like a weapon, was natural to human beings. It showed interestin oe's fellows, interest in the well being of the tribe. "Gossip was a way to learn taboos, pass on warnings, share the burden fo being human among many so the onus of bearing it alone would fall on no one person. " Molly said. From an Anna Pigeon Novel

Whoever had come up with the chant "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" had been an idiot.

Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.

For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book's inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.

One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good.

You've got to stay in the game. Your luck's bound to change. Be a shame to miss it

Dead strangers evoked a smorgasbord of the lesser emotions and served as marvelous educational tools, warnings, and veiled threats. When an acquaintance was killed, it was closer to home; one knew some of the threads that tied the deceased to a common humanity. Without enough real connection to grieve, one was left in an uncomfortable place between curiosity and embarrassment.

With the Regional Office breathing down her neck... Corinne had wanted to keep the Drury case low-key, uncontroversial. since Craig's disappearance had set he alarm bells off, Anna was willing to be she'd change tactics, make a noisy show of taking command of the situation. For a while the name of the game at Guadalupe Mountains would be Cover Your Ass.

Trying to second-guess lunatics, drunks, or the Office of Personnel Management was an exercise in frustration. The logic totally eluded her.

Bureaucrats -- monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil -- are first in line for promotion.

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

Ghosts were not the spirits of the dead returning but the memories of the living not yet laid to rest.

Anna was too old to believe that people always lied for a reason. Mostly they lied because it was easy, felt good, or was habit.