Alexandra Cooper Quotes

Your library is your portrait.

Who needs the fairy tale when crazy, messy, sexy reality with the woman I adore is a million times better?

I've just been around too much death today not to wonder why we find it appropriate to organize our festivities in and around the tombs of all these ancient cultures.

I understood there's a difference between compromise and cooperation, and that to rely on another takes a distinctive kind of strength.

I'm tired of being Scarlett O'Hara. In my next life I'm going to come back as Melanie Wilkes, fragile and helpless.

You’ve been in more hotel rooms, Coop, than Gideon’s Bible,

Good girls keep diaries; bad girls don’t have the time.’ Tallulah Bankhead, by the way.

Listen, Mike, I don’t know what happens in parochial schools—most of the guys survive the nuns and come out with a sense of humor—some a little more tasteful than yours, but humor nonetheless. This guy came out like Mother Superior himself, with a stick up his ass that should have punctured his brain by now

You can keep the harasser a certain number of feet away from the victim’s front door, order him not to enter her workplace, and demand that his calls and letters cease, but once she’s an open target walking in a public space or street or subway, the thin sheet of paper handed to her by a judge as an order of the court is as worthless as Confederate currency. The criminal justice system is far more capable of dealing with murder than with harassment, though the line that divides them is often deceptively slim.

If his happiness were my goal, Mike, I would have gone to clown school, you know?

Stabbings, shooting, rapes, homicides -- the denizens of places like the Elk brought those crimes along with them the way ordinary travelers carried luggage.

He wanted her cooperation, her sympathy, her active and intellectual help. He wanted her, not her heart, but her brains, and those material advantages which birth had given her. - Alexandra Farraday

...Battaglia gagged her. Told her to take the high road. Fuck the high road, I said. It's usually a dead end. --Mike Chapman to Lee, Crime Scene Photographer.

Good thing you’ve been a source

Mike ignored me and walked off. I understood the dynamic and knew that, as close as the three of us were, I was an outsider in these circumstances. The fraternity of police officers who put their lives on the line every day for the rest of us circles the wagons pretty tightly when one of their own is harmed

I'm telling you, the lunatics are really running the asylum when it comes to the criminal courts

The Internet was creating more opportunities for perverts than most of us had imagined, and law enforcement agencies were less aggressive than the cyber-geeks in coming up with solutions

There were days when my colleagues and I were sure there was nothing left that one human being could do to another that could shock us. And then, without fail, something else came along to prove us wrong

Me, I always thought the international art world was for the elegant and elite. Classy, calm, sedate, cultured, I'm tellin' you, there are more lowlifes in this business than all the Hannibal Lecter wanna-bes in the world.

It was after eight o'clock, and all I could see of the sun was its gleaming crown as it slipped behind the row of steep cliffs, giving off an iridescent pink haze that signaled the end of a long August day. Brackish gray water swirled and broke against the large rocks that edged the mound of dirt on which I stood, spitting up at my ankles as I stared out to the west at the Palisades. The pleats of my white linen skirt, which had seemed so cool and weightless as I moved about the air-conditioned courtroom all afternoon, were plastered against my thighs by the humidity, and I swatted off the mosquitoes as they searched for a place to land on my forearms

Maybe Chapman wasn't entirely crazy - live fast, die young, and be a good-looking corpse

There isn't anyone in the business," he went on, "who hasn't been accused of selling a forged piece, by accident or design, over the years. And then there's the current brouhaha in the auction houses, with the government charging sellers with rigging the bids to knock up the prices. On the surface, gentlemen, it's a world of exquisite beauty and refinement. But it's every bit as filthy and cutthroat as any other commercial enterprise, as soon as you get beneath the top layer of gouache

The truth is so rare, Alex. I like to use it sparingly

TRUDY COOPER:

Soon there'll be nothing left to the law but acronyms, DNA swabs, and every man's right to claim an exoneration the moment after he's convicted

More than 80 percent of sexual assaults occurred between people who knew each other, so identification was not the issue at trial. Yet these victims were far more likely to have their credibility attacked in the courtroom.

never, never frown in her direction, because she takes everything very personally.

Life’s full of surprises,

Lanny Bellin, Daniel’s stepfather.

Fat people are harder to kidnap...You never read in the paper that the victim of an abduction weighed in at three-fifty. They're always skinny broads like you who get carted away. It's simply a fact.

Paul Grice, a twentieth-century philosopher, famously described various “conversational maxims,” known to us implicitly, that regulate language use. Their use marks you as a cooperative speaker; even their express violation is often meaningful. They include the charming maxim of relation (be relevant), the maxim of manner (be brief and clear), and maxims of quality (tell the truth) and quantity (say only as much as you need to).