Pat Donlin

“Well, this bastard isn’t retarded.” She looked up at me, her eyes hard. “Of course he isn’t,” Wesley agreed. “Psychopaths are anything but stupid. What we want to do is make the guy think we think he’s stupid. Hit him where it hurts—his goddam pride, which is hooked up with his grandiose notions of his off-the-charts IQ.”
― Patricia Daniels Cornwell, Postmortem

“Even now, three years later, when she opens the drawer beside the stove for an oven mitt, she finds the oven mitts folded. This is because, three years earlier, during an intense game of Scattergories, when the category was Things You Fold and the letter was O, her husband had written oven mitts. “Nobody folds oven mitts,” she scoffed, and refused him his point, forcing him, ever since, to prove it.”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

“maybe she was just so used to getting away with everything, maybe she couldn’t believe she’d ever have to pay, flashing her devil-may-care grin over her shoulder as she fishtailed on her Big Wheel, leaving me behind in a spray of gravel, me always running, running to catch up”
― Beth Ann Fennelly, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs

“The profession, either navy or army, is its own justification. It has every thing in its favour; heroism, danger, bustle, fashion. Soldiers and sailors are always acceptable in society. Nobody can wonder that men are soldiers and sailors.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park