Q Is For Quarry Quotes
"Never, never, never, to live beyond my means."
"I don't see how you face death without believing in something. Otherwise, it makes no sense."
"Getting well takes work and no one wants to waste energy on superficial conversation."
"The office is meant to serve me, not the other way around."
"I lead a stripped-down existence untroubled by bairn, pets, or living household plants."
"I suppose I was suffering from a mutant, possibly incurable form of spring fever, which consisted of feeling bored, restless, and disconnected from humanity at large."
"I don't want to be compelled to take on work to meet my overhead."
"As long as Gracie was alive, she seemed to keep him in check, but now his smoking and booze consumption are out of control."
"In the harsh light of day, I could see that, despite the transfusion, his skin had gray undertones."
"The back bumper was askew, the left rear fender was crumpled, and a long indentation on the passenger side rendered the door close to inoperable."
"I understand now how it must have felt from her perspective."
"The air smelled of the hot, sun-dried pastures sprinkled with buttercups, where occasional cattle grazed."
"Being's as you're here, you might want to see the rest of the property."
"You're stuck with us whether you like it or not."
"Maybe we should stop and have a chat about that."
"You'd have to sit there for hours with that drill screaming in your head."
"I'm phobic about dentists in case you haven't heard."
"Let's see if we can get the coroner's office to run another set of prints."
"I can't believe she'll show up, given her age at the time of death."
"Don't you believe me? I notice you didn't take notes."
"It's odd to see someone you know looks like you. The face we see in the mirror is always reversed so that our impression of ourselves is flipped left to right."
"As a rule, I avoid makeup, having little experience with the selection and application process."
"We smiled at the same time, which only furthered the notion we were looking at ourselves."
"There are two sides to every story. That's why we have the courts. To settle disputes."
"I thought it'd be rude to ask if I could bite her necklace."
"The hard part is that neither of us has any concrete proof. We can do this 'Did too! Did not!' routine until the cows come home."
"Just keep an open mind. That's really all I ask."
"It feels like unfinished business and that bothers me. Regardless of how it comes out, I'd like to think I'm doing the right thing."
"Sometimes you work because there's nothing else to do."
"It's someone's pet project. 'Couple of guys I work with."
"I'm not fascinated with anything, except the truth."
"You haven't finished telling me about the trip. I've never been on a cruise. I really want to know what it was like."
"I still get in trouble with the law, but at least I'm clean and sober – condition of my parole. Right now, I do, you know, five, six meetings a week. Not that I like hanging out with dudes hyped up on coffee and cigarettes, but it sure beats incarceration."
"What struck me afterward was not the hippie van so much as that other car I saw. Snappy-looking red convertible with Arizona plates."
"Trouble with getting old is you lose all the people you tell your stories to."
"Never let it be said God doesn't have a sense of humor."
"Meantime, I'm not lying here idle. I put in another call to the Sheriffs Department. Joe Mandel's made detective so I'm hoping he'll let us take a look at the Jane Doe evidence."
"I work nights, if it's any of your business."
"I'm living proof. Went from bad to good and now I'm free as a bird."
"Too bad Crouse is gone. There aren't many of us left."
"For ten cents, I'd have scampered around the desk and crawled up in her lap."
"It's not the Kinseys so much as the LeGrands."
"Just because we're old doesn't mean we're mature."
"You can't save anyone except yourself. Sometimes, you can't even do that."
"There's no condition in life that can't be ameliorated by a dose of junk food."
"I'm not sure what the lieutenant told him. You'd have to ask him."
"I'd hoped for more, but I can see your point."
"My knees wouldn't take it so I sent her on alone."
"The yellow of the sauce was suspiciously bright, suggesting that the 'chef' had used a packet of powdered Hollandaise."
"The town of Quorum was roughly twenty-five streets wide, transected by five big boulevards that ran east and west."
"A squirrel was perched up on its haunches peering in at him."
"Flesh-colored hearing aids filled his ear cavities like flattened wads of bubble gum."
"The squirrel picked up a sunflower seed and nibbled rapidly, cracking the shell, tail twitching."
"As soon as I was set, the engine conked out on me."
"You have to 'plan in advance, maybe ten to fifteen moves."
"More personality than some folks I've known and he's easily amused."
"The grass looked patchy and the flagpole was bare."
"It's hard enough to be ill without feeling as though you've made a spectacle of yourself."
"I wondered if the students made the same melancholy association: from Youth to Death with only a stone's throw between."
"That's how they express their unique individuality."
"What else could I do? I didn't even know her mother's name."
"Seems like the other question is whether the stains in the trunk match the ones on the tarp."
"Cactus, mesquite, and creosote bushes grew at neatly spaced intervals, as though planted by an arborist."
"I'd read that jackrabbits constitute half the diet of breeding coyotes, so that when hard times reduce the rabbit population, the coyote population shrinks, as well, thus maintaining the balance in Nature's culinary scheme."
"I really hate to be pushy, but what's a poor girl to do?"
"As we watched, the dog caught a mouthful of Cissy's sock. Growling, he tugged, trying to dig in his paws while she dragged him across the grass."
"It's like dogs, chasing your own tails. Try something new. I'm tired of tarps."
"You sit. I'll go. You want a Coke with that Whopper?"
"Even in broad daylight, I could smell defeat."
"This is me being as happy as I'm ever going to get."
"Quit being so pushy and let me tell it my way."
"My whole life's about that – cleaning up other people's messes."
"He's not dumb by any stretch, but he's lazy as all get out."
"This isn't about me, lona. It's about Charisse."
"I don't care if you told him. I just want the information."
"There's no activity more profoundly boring than sitting in a Laundromat, waiting for the washer and dryer to click through their cycles from beginning to end."
"Life had gone on. The killer had managed to strike once and get away with it."
"Intuition is odd. After one of those gut-level leaps, you can sometimes go back and trace the trajectory."
"Nature is generous. Pudgie, in death, was a veritable feast."
"The stakes were still high. In the intervening years, someone had enjoyed a life that was built on a lie."
"Whatever weeping she did was silent. Now that she knew the worst, there was something passive in her response, a resignation she must have harbored for years, waiting for the blow."
"You belong to a church? I'd be happy to make some calls."
"Trouble is, I don't know if I was too tough on him or not tough enough."
"Keeping a systematic set of notes has its soothing side effects."
"Nature has her little ways of reminding us how small and frail we are: Our existence is temporary while hers will go on long after our poor flesh has failed."
"The ice in her highball glass had long since melted away."
"She was submerged in the murky depths of alcohol, where sound couldn't penetrate and no light reached."
"I'm not sure that's what happened here, but it's giving me the creeps."
"I didn't want to live my whole life only knowing one girl."
"You don't need a license to buy one and you don't have to worry about a three-day waiting period while your local hardware salesman runs a background check."
"I thought my paranoia might keep me awake, but since I'm a person of no depth whatever, I fell asleep right away."
"The moon had been reduced to the size of a fingernail paring."
"Despite her admonition, I'd brought a dense chocolate cake in a pink bakery box."
"Lights shone from every room of Felicia's small house."
"Felicia had dimmed the lights, using votives and candles to illuminate the rooms."
"I suppose the gathering could have been called a wake, though there was certainly no corpse present."
"Cheap shit that I am, earlier in the day I'd ducked into a Goodwill thrift store, where I'd found a pair of serviceable black wool slacks and a short black jacket."
"The air was dry and cold. The usual wind whiffled through the trees, making the shaggy palms sway."
"I had no way of guessing how many people had come and gone in the hours before my arrival, but the number of mourners I saw was embarrassingly small."
"I wondered where Cornell was the night that Pudgie was killed."