Nevada Barr > Quotes

“perhaps love was like the mumps. If a woman came down with it after forty, it could kill her”
― Nevada Barr, 13½

“Anna remembered her fifth grade teacher, Mr. White, telling her that hatred wasn't the worst of emotions. If one hated, one still cared. Indifference was the most inhuman.”
― Nevada Barr, Endangered Species

“Deliberately, she took a long drink. It wasn't as good as she remembered, but then little was. She caught herself in that thought and was ashamed. Cynicism was okay, bitterness a pain in the neck. The hairline difference between the two was hope and humor. The cynic had both, the embittered, nothing.”
― Nevada Barr

“Anna… envied Joan’s deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she’d been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider.”
― Nevada Barr, Blood Lure

“She was forty before she realized that when she asked a man what he was thinking and he said, “Nothing,” he wasn’t lying.”
― Nevada Barr, What Rose Forgot

“From long experience she knew that she wore her loneliness like armor. Very few people ever recognized it for what it was. To the casual observer it looked very much like arrogance. Sometimes it was.”
― Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat

“My definition of forgiveness is a sigh, very like a sigh of relief, on which the memory of evil is breathed out.

With letting go of the memory, discontinuing the incessant replaying of pain, and instead feeling the unmitigated overness of the evil, the evildoer often looks quite different: flawed, like me, a child of God, like me. Forgiven, like me.”
― Nevada Barr

“Hers was an evil-sounding chuckle that Anna loved. The sort of chortle Dorothy might have heard shortly before all hell broke loose in the land of Oz”
― Nevada Barr, Endangered Species

“When she finally found her way onto the Trace, the sun was rising and, with it, her spirits.

The Natchez Trace Parkway, a two lane road slated, when finished to run from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, had been the brainchild of the Ladies' Garden Clubs in the South. Besides preserving a unique part of the nations past,...the Trace would not be based on spectacular scenery but would conserve the natural and agricultural history of Mississippi.”
― Nevada Barr, Deep South

“In a world that is becoming increasingly virtual, the parks remain places of visceral beauty. Places where we can remember that we are but a small part of the life on this planet, and that it is a truly wonderful planet and the only one we've got.”
― Nevada Barr

“As she drove the Trace, each curve revealing a scene rich with life and as picturesque as illustrations from a children's book, Anna was struck again by the beauty of the state. Over her years as a Yankee and a Westerner, she'd heard Mississippi described many ways. Beautiful had never been one of them.”
― Nevada Barr, Deep South

“you use your whole body like you did when you played as a kid. Grown-up amusements don’t allow for crawling and wriggling, getting good and muddy, and tearing the knees of your pants.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“when she was a young woman she valued intelligence over all other human attributes. Now that she was older she valued kindness.”
― Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat

“The batteries in his radio died and came back so often they could have had regular roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
― Nevada Barr, Winter Study

“...she couldn't decide which was worse: pending alcoholism, or remorseless unrelenting sobriety of the rest of her days.”
― Nevada Barr , Track of the Cat

“Like many people who lasted any length of time in the rescue professions, she'd worn out the 'if' factor pretty quickly. You were where you were. You went where you went. You did what you could. Mostly, people were better off after you showed up than before.”
― Nevada Barr, Liberty Falling

“Bureaucrats -- monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil -- are first in line for promotion.”
― Nevada Barr , Track of the Cat

“With the Regional Office breathing down her neck... Corinne had wanted to keep the Drury case low-key, uncontroversial. since Craig's disappearance had set he alarm bells off, Anna was willing to be she'd change tactics, make a noisy show of taking command of the situation. For a while the name of the game at Guadalupe Mountains would be Cover Your Ass.”
― Nevada Barr , Track of the Cat

“Anna took her solace where she always did. The smell of the earth, the touch of the sky held for her a special alchemy, able to turn loneliness into aloneness, and so make it, if not sacred, at least bearable.”
― Nevada Barr, Deep South

“For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book’s inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.”
― Nevada Barr

“Ghosts were not the spirits of the dead returning but the memories of the living not yet laid to rest.”
― Nevada Barr, Ill Wind

“Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.”
― Nevada Barr, Hunting Season

“One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good.”
― Nevada Barr

“Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope

“Trying to second-guess lunatics, drunks, or the Office of Personnel Management was an exercise in frustration. The logic totally eluded her.”
― Nevada Barr , Track of the Cat

“By the time they reached the Queens Highway turnoff, Anna found she liked Sheila more in memoriam that she would’ve guessed.”
― Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat

“You’ve got to stay in the game. Your luck’s bound to change. Be a shame to miss it,”
― Nevada Barr, A Superior Death

“Criminals were a lazy bunch. If they weren’t, they’d get their MBAs and rob with impunity.”
― Nevada Barr, Track of the Cat

“Dead strangers evoked a smorgasbord of the lesser emotions and served as marvelous educational tools, warnings, and veiled threats. When an acquaintance was killed, it was closer to home; one knew some of the threads that tied the deceased to a common humanity. Without enough real connection to grieve, one was left in an uncomfortable place between curiosity and embarrassment.”
― Nevada Barr, Endangered Species

“Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.”
― Nevada Barr, The Rope