Camino Island Quotes
"F. Scott Fitzgerald continued to fascinate. The traffic was as heavy now as it had been three decades earlier."
"An early death was often the key to later acclaim (not to mention greater royalties)."
"F. Scott Fitzgerald enrolled in Princeton in the fall of 1913, dreaming of writing the great American novel."
"The library quickly realized that it would be unwise to allow researchers to physically handle them."
"It was, of course, a forgery, but a perfect one."
"Every American college has elaborate plans to handle a situation involving an 'active gunman'."
"The power outage triggered alarms at the central monitoring station inside the campus security complex, but no one was paying attention."
"Jerry, sitting in the dark study carrel in the library, made a similar call from his prepaid cell phone."
"The danger had clearly passed, though the area was still ablaze with flashing lights."
"We have all five," Denny said calmly. "Let's get outta here."
"Trey casually strode across the campus, mixed in with a crowd of the curious."
"In less than twenty-four hours, the heist was successfully completed."
"The celebration was postponed until the four hunters arrived at the cabin, deep in the Poconos."
"The first pair of FBI agents arrived at the Firestone Library just after 7:00 a.m."
"Life was indeed good. Less than twenty-four hours earlier, they were on the campus, hiding in the dark, nervous as hell but also loving the thrill of the chase."
"Early the following morning, as Denny cooked eggs and bacon and guzzled black coffee, Mark sat at the counter with a laptop, scanning headlines from up and down the East Coast."
"As ominous as these preparations were, the mood was still light, even celebratory."
"All trails became dead ends. Tips that had at first seemed urgent now faded away."
"He read deep into the night and often fell asleep with an open book in the bed."
"He read early in the morning, alone in the store with strong coffee, long before it opened."
"On a perfect spring day in late April, Mercer Mann walked with some anxiety across the Chapel Hill campus."
"No scene was clear, so that the reader was never certain what was going on."
"Means I’m basically homeless and unemployed and desperate to finish a book."
"I can outwrite her with one hand tied behind me."
"With the Internet everybody is now a published author, you know?"
"He’s a charmer, though, and can tell great stories about prison."
"She had asked herself a hundred times what, exactly, she was doing there."
"The ocean was a minefield with so many predators that only one baby turtle in a thousand would see adulthood."
"A room filled with writers, with their insecurities and egos and jealousies."
"The happiest days of my life, so far at least, were spent with her on the beach and on the island."
"He would repeat the nesting once or twice during the season before migrating back to his feeding ground."
"A once promising writer suffering through an endless drought."
"There are too many good books I want to read to waste time with a bad one."
"Most writers say too much, so always look for things to cut, like throwaway sentences and unnecessary scenes."
"If you feel the need to go to the thesaurus, look for a word with three syllables or fewer."
"Books are damaged by light, heat, and moisture, so all three must be controlled."
"It’s hard to write when you’re broke, Mercer, I know that."
"Books don’t leave trails, Mercer. A lot of them are passed down like jewelry—not always accounted for, if you know what I mean."
"Every writer she’d ever met carried a mean streak of envy; it was the nature of the breed."
"It’s never been clear whether he and Ellen actually lived together, and there was even a pretty strong rumor that she had a child that died at birth."
"But love is about trust and commitment and sharing every aspect of your lives."
"Don’t be such a sap, Mercer. We’re not talking about love; we’re talking about sex. Pure physical pleasure."
"Friends? How many female friends do you have?"
"For a few bucks it seems like you’re assuming a rather significant risk."
"He is. We’ve been trading for a long time and I trust him implicitly."
"How can anyone possibly prove you ever saw this manuscript?"
"The operation, with Mercer in the center, had just succeeded."
"With Bruce Cable, there was no moral high ground."
"She was secretly thrilled to be so close to him."