Laura Lippman > Quotes

“Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.”
― Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.”
― Laura Lippman

“She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.”
― Laura Lippman, By a Spider's Thread

“Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.”
― Laura Lippman, The Most Dangerous Thing

“There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.”
― Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her

“It's a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.”
― Laura Lippman, Sunburn

“The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.”
― Laura Lippman, In a Strange City

“There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.”
― Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“...Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.”
― Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her

“I hate to think how many minutes of my life I've spent on goddamn hold. I want those minutes back. When death comes for me, I want back every minute I was on hold in traffic jams, and behind people with eleven items in the ten items or less line.”
― Laura Lippman, In Big Trouble

“But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would.”
― Laura Lippman, Baltimore Blues

“But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality.”
― Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.”
― Laura Lippman, After I'm Gone

“Sometimes you have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them. (7)”
― Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

“Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything. And if you could, you would wish you didn’t.”
― Laura Lippman, Wilde Lake

“No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.”
― Laura Lippman, I'd Know You Anywhere

“It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.”
― Laura Lippman, Baltimore Blues

“Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.”
― Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her

“The problem was that such simple, ordinary bliss seldom formed memories. It was too smooth and silken to adhere. It was the bad stuff, ragged and uneven, that caught, like all those plastic grocery bags stuck in the trees of Baltimore.”
― Laura Lippmann, Life Sentences

“No one at fifteen was ever in love, outside of Romeo and Juliet, and maybe not even them. Old Giff used to argue that the star-crossed lovers simply were buzzed on the fumes of forbidden lust. Give them thirty years of togetherness, Old Giff always said, and Juliet would be plunging the dagger into Romeo.”
― Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three

“There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again.”
― Laura Lippman, I'd Know You Anywhere

“Doing nothing,” Inez said, “is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.”
― Laura Lippman, I'd Know You Anywhere

“I hate the habit of calling women high-maintenance, as if they were cars or appliances. As if women, in general, require care in a way that men do not.”
― Laura Lippman, Hush Hush

“The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit--it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.”
― Laura Lippman, Wilde Lake

“Relationships are chess for women," he said. "They can see the whole board, plan way ahead. They're the queens, after all. We're the kings, limited to one square in any direction, on defense for the whole fucking game.”
― Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know

“Tough, yet brittle. That’s the thing about being really hard. When you do break, you shatter.”
― Laura Lippman, Sunburn

“Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.”
― Laura Lippman, And When She Was Good

“Just because you worked hard on something didn’t make it worth doing.”
― Laura Lippman, I'd Know You Anywhere

“Going to college don't make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an over can call itself a biscuit.”
― Laura Lippman, Pony Girl

“The thing people are never indifferent to are differences.”
― Laura Lippman, Wilde Lake