Carol O'Connell > Quotes

“When strangers on a train or a plane ask what I do for a living, I say, "I kill people." This response makes for a short conversation. No eye contact and no sudden movement from my seat-mate. Only peace and quiet. Rare is the fellow passenger who asks why I do it.

I suppose I got tired hanging out in a book all day waiting for a story to begin. I write the kind of novels I want to read. And why the theme of solving murders? Violent death is larger than life and it's the great equalizer. By law, every victim is entitled to a paladin and a chase, else life would be cheapened.

And the real reason I do this? My brain is simply bent this way. There is nothing else I would rather do. This neatly chains into my theory of the writing life. If you scratch an artist, under the skin you will find a bum who cannot hold down a real job. Conversely, if you scratch a bum... but I have never done that.

The heart of my theory has puritan roots: if you love what you do, you cannot call it honest work.”
― Carol O'Connell

“After my first book was published, I received an envelope full of religious material from a fan who wanted to save my soul. That’s when I knew I was on to something.”
― Carol O'Connell

“Crazy is a place," said Janos. "You go, you come back.”
― Carol O'Connell, Crime School

“You know it's a dysfunctional family," said Riker, "when the one you like best is a mass murderer.”
― Carol O'Connell, Winter House

“Charles did not hear the door close, yet he knew that he was alone. Though he might not always see her coming, he could always tell when he had been left behind. So simple, really. He kept getting hit by the same damn train.”
― Carol O'Connell, It Happens in the Dark

“The little man behind that desk was the joke candidate of election years, best remembered for his trademark yellow bowtie. In Riker's fashion philosophy, bows should be reserved to the pigtails of little girls or the collars of tiny dogs hatched from peanut shells.”
― Carol O'Connell, The Chalk Girl

“On the way home from school, we stop off for a slice of pizza -- Phoebe's treat. She says there's an upside to what they did to me today. I've marked my place in the annals of school history. She says, "They'll never get that bloodstain out.”
― Carol O'Connell, The Chalk Girl

“And the civilian yelled, "I'm from the Times!" which made him a reporter and thus a legal kill in the codebook of the NYPD.”
― Carol O'Connell, The Chalk Girl

“Today, in jeans and a sweatshirt, she was dressed in solid gray right down to her boots, and he wondered if this was Loman's idea of fashion, matching the color of her clothes to her hair.”
― Carol O'Connell, It Happens in the Dark

“And so he suspected the mayor of easing the budget crunch for sheltering the poor by giving them one-way bus tickets to warmer climates. And that was cold.”
― Carol O'Connell, It Happens in the Dark

“Timing is everything.”
― Carol O'Connell

“Hubris, thy name is Mallory -- she believed she could get away with mouthing off to the chief of D's in front of witnesses. She could not. Coffey could tell that much by the change in the atmosphere -- the dead silence of a room with too many guns in it.”
― Carol O'Connell, The Chalk Girl

“Sempre que sonhava, morria no sonho.”
― Carol O'Connell, Bone by Bone

“Jack Coffey shrugged, and this was akin to waving a white flag of surrender. Sometimes losing was a good idea. Failure could be so restful. His tension headache was gone even before his two detectives had been dispatched uptown to Central Park.”
― Carol O'Connell, The Chalk Girl

“Toothbrushes kept company with cellophane-packaged voodoo dolls and all the other little things that tourists might have forgotten to bring with them. Charles”
― Carol O'Connell, Stone Angel

“Unable to reach back to her book bag, she was reduced to reading the advertising cards above the heads of other passengers. One sign said ‘Kiss warts and bunions goodbye.’ Another ad was for Right to Life proponents. If you knew an unwed mother-to-be, there was a number where you could turn her in.”
― Carol O'Connell, Mallory's Oracle

“Keeping track of Oren had once been the schoolgirl hobby of summer vacations.”
― Carol O'Connell, Bone by Bone

“Painful endurance was the twisted gift they gave to one another, each with the best intentions”
― Carol O'Connell, Judas Child

“You know it’s a dysfunctional family,” said Riker, “when the one you like the best is a mass murderer.”
― Carol O'Connell, Winter House

“Mallory took no great pride in this, for defeating the FBI’s outdated system was a rite of passage for small children all over America.”
― Carol O'Connell, Find Me

“He could hear noises of a pet inside the apartment, one too small to bark like a real dog.”
― Carol O'Connell, It Happens in the Dark

“As an alien in a television nation, he was never made anxious by manic broadcasters with red alerts and terrorist forecasts, for he preferred to read newspapers, which told him only what had actually happened.”
― Carol O'Connell, The Chalk Girl

“She didn't wait for a response, but neither did she slam the receiver down in anger, as he might have predicted. If profound despair could be discerned in the simple mechanical click of a disconnected telephone, then he understood her state of mind”
― Carol O'Connell, Judas Child

“Death was not a mere lack of animation, but a subtraction from the world”
― Carol O'Connell, Judas Child

“When she got off at 117th Street, the subway’s morning ammonia smell was beginning to accumulate more legitimate odors of authentic urine as she passed by a man pissing on the wall.”
― Carol O'Connell, Mallory's Oracle

“Miss Rice loaned me the negatives, and I ordered these prints from the drugstore in town. No comparison to Josh's work. He was gifted in a dying art form. I don't think he would've cared for the age of digital cameras.”
― Carol O'Connell, Bone by Bone

“A suicide club? You’re a bit young for such a dead-end idea.” The girl only lifted one slight shoulder in response, and her friend said, “We’re from Jersey,” as if that said it all.”
― Carol O'Connell, It Happens in the Dark

“In Rouge's experience, it was always a good idea to keep one eye on the end of a fuse - so a man could pull back before his balls were ripped off by the blast. All women carried dynamite; it was issued to them at birth, along with many packs of matches for lighting fuses”
― Carol O'Connell, Judas Child