"I've learned that life is never what you expect it will be. Just as you come to the fringes of happiness, touching it, feeling it, tasting it -- and desperately hoping for the rest of it -- it's jerked away."
Charles Todd, A Test Of Wills
"When a man was idle, his demons marched like ghostly armies in the forefront of his mind."
Charles Todd, Legacy of the Dead
"Eve is always blamed for offering Adam the apple, but it's my view that he had been looking for an excuse to see how it tasted. He would have bitten into it on his own in a day or two."
Charles Todd, Legacy of the Dead
"...the Cardinal had to be a hard-liner on morality and the liturgy, ... That was the only way to bring the little people back into the fold. The little people were always so impressed with pomp and circumstance, and so respectful of authority -- as long as it behaved like authority. What the little people wanted more than anything else was not to be forced to think."
Jane Haddam, A Great Day For The Deadly
"The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter."
Malcolm Gladwell, Blink
"The difference between a geek and a dork is that a geek wonders what sex is like in zero gravity; a dork wonders what sex is like."
Robert J. Sawyer, WWW: Wake
"It's not how many people you offend that matters. It's who."
Jane Haddam, Stillness in Bethlehem
"I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se is mind crushing. It is a soul-deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing."
Harlan Ellison, Strange Wine
"Television is like a strain of the common cold that can spread like lightning through a population, but only causes a few sniffles and is gone in a day."
Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point
"Their lovemaking had been a little tentative at first, but that was only to be expected. It never really in real life the way it did in movies, with both lovers exploding together in a climax of Wagnerian proportions as fireworks burst, orchestras cresendoed and trains rushed into tunnels. ... In real lovemaking, especially people new to one another's bodies, there are disappointments, mistakes, hesitancies. If you can laugh at these ... then you are halfway there. If you find yourself looking forward to the hours of practice it will take to learn to please one another more ... then you are more than halfway."
Peter Robinson, In A Dry Season
"What is happiness? Something you measure in relation to unhappiness?"
Peter Robinson, In A Dry Season
"I don't [respect people who have such passion]. I have a lot of interests, some I'm passionate about, but not to the exclusion of everything else. I sometimes wonder if that's necessary for geniuses to accomplish what they must, a singularity of purpose. We mere mortals just get in the way."
Louise Penny, Bury Your Dead
"Consumers don't buy products, so much as narratives."
William Gibson, Zero History
"Even the delusionally paranoid have enemies."
William Gibson, Zero History
"And now Watson I commend to you the universal answer to almost all problems."
"What's that Holmes?"
"Sleep."
Jeremy Brett / Edward Hardwicke, The Return of Sherlock Holmes Collection
"Studies have shown, again and again, that prettier people are generally happier than us normal-looking folk. The reason money can't buy happiness is, money can't buy good looks. Plastic surgeons can only do so much."
Greg Olear, Totally Killer