Sue Grafton

So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.

Let__ face it, life is trivial, and my guess is that dying imparts very little wisdom on those in process.

Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.

You can__ save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don__ appreciate your interfering with the drama they__e created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don__ want to change.

Thinking is hard work, which is why you don't see many people doing it.

Insecure people have a special sensitivity for anything that finally confirms their own low opinion of themselves.

It's disconcerting to realize how little you have to say to someone who once occupied such a prominent place in your bed.

Books are like movies of the mind and it's better to leave Kinsey where she is.

We all need to look into the dark side of our nature - that's where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we're busy denying.

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.

It never pays to deal with the flyweights of the world. They take far too much pleasure in thwarting you at every turn.

I love being single. It's almost like being rich.

The tricky part of any lie is trying to figure out how you'd behave if you were innocent.

I'm a born liar myself and I know how it's done. You stick as close to the truth as you can. You pretend to volunteer a few bits of information, but the facts are all carefully selected for effect.

Personally I don__ endorse the notion of mortality. It__ fine for other folk, but I disapprove of the concept for me and my loved ones. Seems unfair that we__e not allowed to vote on the matter and not one of us is excused. Who made up that rule?" - Kinsey Millhone

All the little birdies had flown out of this man's tree.

People always love it when you say their dogs are nice. Just shows you how out of touch they are.

I thought about the current contamination of beaches, raw sewage spilling into oceans and streams, the hole in the ozone, forests being stripped, the toxic-waste dumps, the merry plunder of mankind added to the drought and the famine that nature dishes up annually as a matter of course. It's hard to know what's actually going to get us first. Sometimes I think we should just blow the whole planet and get it over with. It's the suspense that's killing me.