The Bone Collector Quotes
"The plane had touched down two hours late and there’d been a marathon wait for the luggage."
"Something about the color and the similarity of the cars reminded her of insects."
"Past the old Navy Yard, past the Brooklyn piers."
"It was as if someone had cut it off with a hacksaw."
"The driver turned back to the cab. With a loud snap he pulled up on the latch and slowly opened the door."
"She wanted to quit. Call in a 10-90, unfounded report, and go back to the Deuce."
"The hot wind rustled the dry brush and cars and trucks sped noisily to and from the Lincoln Tunnel."
"Backing away, she couldn’t take her eyes off his and nearly stumbled over a railroad track."
"Sachs stared at the finger, the one whittled down to the bone."
"Sachs had finally remembered the next of the first officer’s ADAPT rules."
"The sound of angry horns began to fill the hazy morning sky, soon supplemented by the drivers’ angrier shouts."
"In most societies you may have the power but not the right. There’s a difference."
"If you can’t laugh about death, what can you laugh about?"
"The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply."
"Take a big, clean, smooth piece of paper and write down all the reasons why I should kill myself. And then take another big, clean smooth piece of paper and write all the reasons why I shouldn’t."
"I don’t want a long life. It’s as simple as that."
"Who’s ever certain about something like this?"
"There’re a million ways to do yourself in besides pills and Armagnac."
"But even if you know what it is there are usually hundreds or thousands of sources it might have come from."
"Most physical evidence can be identified. But even if you know what it is there are usually hundreds or thousands of sources it might have come from."
"A fingerprint, a DNA profile, a paint chip that fits into a missing spot on the perp’s car like a jigsaw-puzzle piece."
"That’s a volcanic ash that builders use in slurry when they’re digging foundations in watery areas of the city where the bedrock’s deep."
"They often beat Patrol’s squad cars to the scene; on more than one occasion the first officer was a seasoned crime scene tech."
"Walking around. Looking at stuff. He walked miles. All over the city. Buying things, picking up things, collecting things."
"Use your imagination. That’s why God gave us one."
"The city’s big crime scene buses were large vans—filled with instruments and evidence-collection supplies, better equipped than the entire labs of many small towns."
"Rhyme fired him on the spot. Another time a cop took a leak at a scene and flushed the toilet. Man, Rhyme went ballistic."
"He drifted back and forth through time, a day, five years, a hundred years or two, like a dried leaf on a windy day."
"Something had changed about the room but she couldn’t quite decide what."
"People said that sex was all in the mind and Rhyme knew that this was true."
"He remembered, still with a faint crunch of horror, a night six months after the accident."
"He saw in Elaine Chapman Rhyme’s tough, game smile that she was doing it from pity and that stabbed him in the heart."
"Sellitto and Banks had returned and were organizing the evidence Sachs had collected."
"He’s complimenting you," Thom explained. "Enjoy it. That’s the most you’ll ever get out of him."
"No translations needed, please and thank you, Thom."
"He’s got to know botany, geology, ballistics, medicine, chemistry, literature, engineering."
"Ignoring his black, humped body she kicked the post she was tied to. Dust and dirt floated down like gray snow but the wood didn’t give a bit."
"The sticky rush of traffic swallowed the sound."
"That much nitrogen—maybe a firearms or ammunition manufacturer."
"How fast time had raced past today. How slowly it had moved for the past three and a half years."
"The young detective pored over the map of Manhattan, moving aside the pale vertebra that had fallen to the floor earlier."
"Some of my patients think it looks like a stingray. Some say it’s a spaceship. Or an airplane. Or a truck."
"Walk the grid, walk where he’s walked, find what he’s left behind, figure out what he’s taken with him—and you’ll come away from the scene with a profile as clear as a portrait."
"The more beautiful the package, the harder it is to unwrap."
"And for some reason he found himself thinking: Welcome back, Amelia."
"But one of theirs. A Judas lamb with a bell around its neck."
"I can walk through any neighborhood I want and never get mugged. Hike in the mountains and never get tired. Climb a mountain if I want."
"The starlight we see is thousands or millions of years old. By the time it gets to Earth the stars themselves've moved. They're not where we see them."
"It's hard for him to kill. It becomes easier if he makes us accomplices. If we don’t save the vics in time their deaths are partly our fault."
"Motive doesn’t interest me," Rhyme said. "Evidence interests me."
"Crips are generous, crips are kind, crips are iron ... Crips are nothing if not forgiving."
"PE was boring lectures on drowsy spring afternoons at the academy. PE was math, it was charts and graphs, it was science. It was dead."
"Had something of 823 come off on this leaf? A cell of skin? A dot of sweat? It was a stunning thought."
"Who’d buried that poor man this morning, waving for mercy he never got."
"People coming into contact, each transferring something to the other."
"Once again she lifted the plastic bag containing the leaf. He’d actually touched it. Him."
"Well, I am giving it up, Rhyme responded silently. For good."
"They’d been to Giza. And to Guatemala. Nepal. Teheran."
"He floated beneath the surface into the drecky water, full of junk and tendrils of seaweed."
"But no tears anymore. She was here to jump-start her life. The sorrow was behind her now."
"How do you like our adventure so far, honey?"
"Flesh withers and can be weak... Bone is the strongest aspect of the body. As old as we may be in the flesh, we are always young in the bone."
"She wasn't as thin as Esther but, thank God, she was nothing at all like fat Hanna Goldschmidt."
"I'm glad you were first officer yesterday morning. There's nobody else I'd rather've walked the grid with."
"When life is more terrible than death, it's the truest valor to live."
"Maybe the absence of all feeling can be pain too."
"Because you're better than you think you are."
"Life on the street's different now. Things were better then."
"Death cures loneliness. It cures tension. It cures the itch."
"Sometimes you just can't be what you ought to be, you can't have what you ought to have. And life changes."
"We're very superstitious, Sachs. We think calling something by a different name is going to change it."
"If I couldn't drive, if I couldn't move, then maybe I'd do it too. Kill myself."
"I served my time, Sachs. I lived with those bodies for a while. But I gave 'em up."
"Hell no, she thought suddenly. I’m not losing another one."
"She’d unconsciously dug a nail into a burned fingertip."
"I’m going to kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him."
"You take him out. Any sign he’s going for a weapon, anything ... you take him out."
"He’s had it for years," Thom continued. "Learned the sip-’n’-puff cold. That’s the straw control."
"Keep the beam down. He’d be at crotch level too. Remembering what Nick had told her: Perps don’t fly."
"When you’re angry, the only way to deal with it is to wrap up that anger and give it away. Give it to somebody else. Do you hear me? Don’t keep it inside you. Give it away."
"You work too hard. Amie, this case of yours... it wasn’t dangerous, was it?"
"We found his hidey-hole and saved the little girl."
"Remember what you wrote?... in the preface of your textbook?"
"Isn’t this the best, Rhyme? Man, better than sex. Better than anything."
"I don’t think so. Somehow, they seem above that sort of thing."