P.J. Tracy > Quotes

“If anyone ever told five-year-olds the truth about life, he thought, there’d be a rash of kindergarten suicides. ”
― P.J. Tracy, Live Bait

“You two have sex every time you look at each other; sleeping together is just a formality you haven’t gotten around to yet.”
― P.J. Tracy, Live Bait

“There are no nonsmokers in this business. Just people trying to quit, and people who haven’t started yet.”
― P.J. Tracy, Dead Run

“When the sun comes out in Hawaii, it warms up. When the sun comes in Puerto Vallarta, it warms up. when the sun comes out in Minnesota in January, you just go snow-blind.”
― P.J. Tracy

“God made ice for hockey and scotch, and that's about it.”
― P.J. Tracy

“No, it's because every goddamned winter, the brain cells that know how miserable it is here freeze and die. It takes 'em all summer to grow back, and then it's winter all over again and the whole ugle process starts over.”
― P.J. Tracy

“But if you don’t talk about the people you’ve loved and lost, they just fade away.”
― P.J. Tracy, Nothing Stays Buried

“We all walk around with holes in our hearts. But we still walk around.”
― P.J. Tracy, Live Bait

“...the one and only time in his career he'd been tempted to draw his weapon was when a swarm of gnats had descended on him in the motel parking lot. And what was so wrong about killing all the insects? Who cared if the frogs died with them? The only thing frogs were good for was keeping the insect population down, and clearly they were lousy at that.”
― P.J. Tracy, Shoot to Thrill

“As she had learned these past few years, things changed—life, people, animals—all without your permission, no matter how zealously you fought to maintain supreme control.”
― P.J. Tracy, Nothing Stays Buried

“I don’t eat animals.” “What’s the problem with eating animals? Animals don’t have problems eating other animals. You ever have a cat? Those suckers are the sweetest, most adorable little bloodthirsty killers in the world.”
― P.J. Tracy, The Guilty Dead

“Magozzi did so, and they both listened to the media soundbite, delivered by a young male anchor just cutting his very white teeth on the early-morning news. His delivery was robotic, but he’d figure out the teleprompter after some more air time, learn to construct a believable façade of genuine feeling. Sociopaths were able to learn that skill, too, and if they could do it, this kid could.”
― P.J. Tracy, The Guilty Dead

“True happiness isn’t enhanced by pleasure or diminished by sadness, but exists in spite of those things.”
― P.J. Tracy, Ice Cold Heart

“And this, Magozzi thought, was the dreaded black place. The desperate place where people always went when anger and fear couldn’t find any other answer, the place that obliterated logic and compassion and reason and all the other higher functions of the human mind that civilization had fostered.”
― P.J. Tracy, Dead Run

“They passed a bank thermometer that read twenty degrees, but from the cold air blowing into the car, Halloran thought that was pretty optimistic. He’d heard once that all the thermometers in Minnesota were calibrated ten degrees high, just to keep the population from moving en masse.”
― P.J. Tracy, Monkeewrench

“IOMW.”
― P.J. Tracy, Two Evils

“The Chatham’s lobby décor was modern, serene, and understated—dignified hipster meets Tibetan monk—but the heavy police presence outside the sparkling glass doors was ruining the carefully curated Zen atmosphere. Even the potted orchids looked stressed out.”
― P.J. Tracy, Cold Kill

“Happy endings were few and far between, and all too often, families lived in a hellish limbo for months or years, constantly searching for answers and closure they might never”
― P.J. Tracy, Nothing Stays Buried

“Magozzi tried to grimace away a growing headache. He wanted to curl up in a ball in the corner, but when Gino was on a fishing expedition for mermaids, you had to throw in a courtesy line.”
― P.J. Tracy, The Sixth Idea

“mental gymnastics that exonerate you from taking personal responsibility and doing something to rectify your situation. Life isn’t fair, and it never has been. The expectation that it should be, without any effort, is the very definition of insanity in my opinion.” Sam”
― P.J. Tracy, Deep into the Dark

“Suffer the dark, go to the light whenever it's there.”
― P.J. Tracy, Nothing Stays Buried

“The space was filled with people on their devices—’vices, he called them, because there was hardly a more addictive substance out there than any piece of cheap plastic with a microprocessor.”
― P.J. Tracy, Deep into the Dark

“She was Channel Ten’s new replacement for the obnoxious Kristin Keller, a journalist who had never let the facts interfere with her reporting or derail her career trajectory.”
― P.J. Tracy, Nothing Stays Buried

“So what are the chances your ideas are going to fly?” Dahl bowed his head and rubbed his eyes. “Truthfully? Slim to none. I’ve come to realize that government bureaucracy is a quagmire mostly inhabited by people with no imagination or ambition beyond their own personal enrichment, so nothing substantive ever gets done. But if something gets presented that looks like it might solve some problems for them, and help their careers and their paychecks, the wheels can move. It’s all about the packaging.”
― P.J. Tracy, The Guilty Dead

“he held deep contempt for Amanda White on principle,”
― P.J. Tracy, Nothing Stays Buried

“You know the worst thing about bad people, Grace? It’s what they make good people do.”
― P.J. Tracey

“The dead, empty weight of perfect silence lay over the little lake behind the barn.”
― P.J. Tracy, Dead Run

“Magozzi was still smiling, which seemed absolutely inappropriate given the information he was about to deliver, but when had life ever been anything but a sketch in light and dark? Suffer the dark, go to the light whenever it's there.”
― P.J. Tracy, Nothing Stays Buried

“This city more than any other was still all about face-to-face networking, but you’d never know it in a place like this—none of the people here seemed interested in anything beyond the myopic scope of their electronic deities, and his guess was their interactions had nothing to do with business.”
― P.J. Tracy, Deep into the Dark

“Rough night on the town?” “Yeah. Angela and I took the kids to a grandstand show at the State Fair. I spent two hundred bucks on deep-fried food, visited a walk-in cooler to look at a bunch of sculptures carved out of butter, then capped off the night listening to some pre-pubescent boy band whine about girl problems they can’t even begin to imagine yet. Five hours after the show was over, we finally got out of the parking lot.” “And you had the time of your life.” Gino got a goofy look on his face, just like he always did when his family was the topic of conversation. “Pretty much.”
― P.J. Tracy, The Guilty Dead