You can’t take credit for what you do when your back is against the wall.

Some people are little Chernobyls, shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out.

I wanted to tell her that being loved is a talent too, that it takes as much guts and as much work as loving; that some people, for whatever reason, never learn the knack

Her forehead was a maze of anxious little grooves, from a lifetime of wondering about whether everyone within range was OK.

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

Don't you ever feel that - that you just need to get away? From everything? That it's all too much?

I hate nostalgia, it's laziness with prettier accessories.

We think about mortality so little, these days, except to flail hysterically at it with trendy forms of exercise and high-fiber cereals and nicotine patches.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

I don't do that kind of negativity. If you put your energy into thinking about how much the fall would hurt, you're already halfway down.

I had been right: freedom smelled like ozone and thunderstorms and gunpowder all at once, like snow and bonfires and cut grass, it tasted like seawater and oranges.

Coordinating thereEvents and objects with remote eventsAnd vanished objects. Making ornamentsOf accidents and possibilities.

That's why so much of the music today sounds so much alike, because there's no in-between. So it's kind of nice to still turn some buttons every now and then.

I'm not into western medicine. That to me is a complete scare tactic.

You know, it is a terrible thing to appear on television, because people think that you actually know what you're talking about.

The primary reward of the gospel - God himself

Limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.

A leader's attitude is caught by his or her followers more quickly than his or her actions.

If you're going to have a book full of clever people and nobody ever jokes, it's just not going to ring true to the reader. That said, humor writing is the hardest kind of writing there is.

How we are born to invent our own miseries!

You don't want to be in a relationship with someone who's scared of you.