Bone Collector Quotes

Sometimes you can't be what you ought to be, you can't have what you ought to have.

We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets - and oh how we squander those moments.

But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.

I needed somebody without any preconceived ideas. But I also needed somebody with a mind of her own.” The contradictory qualities we seek in that elusive perfect lover. Strength and vulnerability, in equal measures.

The human creature is so astonishing, but count on it before anything else to be just that-a creature. A laughing animal, a dangerous one, a clever one, a scared one, but always acting for a reason-a motive that will move the beast towards its desires.

This only is denied the Gods: the power to remake the past. —ARISTOTLE

Sometimes,” he told me, “you can have something, hold it in your hands or feel it in your bones, and still never understand the working mechanisms behind it.

If they were expected,” she shot back, “then they wouldn’t be breakthroughs, now would they?

as old as we may be in flesh, we are always young in the bone

WHEN YOU MOVE THEY CAN’T GETCHA ‘A

Fire of my heart, come that I may see you, warm my weary bones, be my place of rest.

Criminalistics doesn't exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply- (This quote was never completed in the book because Rhyme stopped abruptly at the end of it. I really wish he had finished his thought.)

My job is not to sell the books - my father does that - but to look after them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Though they're not old enough to be valuable for their age alone, nor improtant enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me, even as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down. People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the boooks they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic. As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead.

You girl-bossed too close to the sun.

For my days vanish like smoke; my bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food. In my distress, I groan aloud and am reduced to skin and bones. I am like a desert owl, like an owl among the ruins. ~Psalm 102 NIV Bible

Being a victim isn’t something that disappears as soon as you’re rescued. It doesn’t vanish the moment the people who hurt you are taken into custody. That sense of it, that awareness of being not just victimized but a victim, it sticks to your bones for years, even decades. That sense of the thing can cause as much damage as the original trauma, as life goes on.

He believed there was nothing essentially unAmerican about greed or lust—hey, those qualities were encouraged everywhere from Wall Street to Capitol Hill.

Nor dread nor hope attend A dying animal; A man awaits his end Dreading and hoping all; Many times he died, Many times rose again. A great man in his pride Confronting murderous men Casts derision upon Supersession of breath; He knows death to the bone – Man has created death.

He was shaking his head as he read some of the words that were written in the pie sections of the wheel; Meat Snatch, Gash and Stitch, Jaws of Life, Tongue Twister, Enema of Horror, Nailed, Dissection, Musical Hair Patches, Eye Deflation, Intestinal Jump Rope, Cooked Until Dripping, Spoon of Pain, Needle Works, Ball Squats, Cut and Rip, Two Headed Cock, Bone Collector, Joint Screws, Fused, Human Tesla Coil, Barbed Wired, Shit Faced, Root and Rod, Colon Blow, Skin Deep, Boiling Nuts, Sewn, Muscle Stimulator, Urethra Tug-o-war, Crack a Cap, Tendon Rubber Bands, Weenie Roast, Musical Extremities, Root Canal, Needle Mania, Tattooed Wall Art, Rod and Prod, Slice and Dice, Sex Change and Torched Beyond Recognition. I

He didn't want to die on Monday. It seemed common.

Ben often comes here. It's some kind of kangaroo graveyard. He likes to collect kangaroo bones. What can I say? It's just something Stink Collectors do.

You’re such a little demon. A succubus sent straight from hell to tempt me.” Gift gave him a slow blink, heart hammering as a smile spread across his face. “Aw, you say the sweetest things.

As you go forward, then, remember this: most men are hunters and collectors. You must come to know the difference between those who do so out of true appreciation and affection, those who do it for sport, those who do it for prestige and to possess what others admire and desire, and those who do it desperate to use a woman as a shield. The fourth man is hiding something. The third man can be like a dog that teases others in it's kennel with the bone it will never share. That kind of man might tear his object of affection to shreds, without meaning to, just as a dog would a bone. The second man can amuse you with the game of the hunt, if you do not take him too seriously. and the first? Well, if you can find the first kind of man, you have found heaven.

Gift yelped as Payton grabbed him beneath his arms and dragged him into his lap, squeezing him tightly. “I missed you.” “I was only gone for a few hours,” Gift said, rolling his eyes. “It was too long. You’re my emotional support human. When you’re gone, I feel at least twenty-four percent more stabby. I’m sure it gets worse the longer you’re gone. Best not to test the theory.

Even now, I'm not sure there's a way to accurately recount the experience without sounding dumb and hammy. I wanted to curl up inside the record; I wanted to inhabit it. Then I wanted it to inhabit me: I wanted to crack it into bits and use them as bones. I wanted it to keep playing forever, from somewhere deep inside my skull. This is how it often begins for collectors: with a feeling that music is suddenly opening up to you.

What if he died here, in this forest, alone? What would become of his bones? Would they crumple and fold into the earth, preserved as a riddle for some other species, hacking one day through stone, to solve? He hadn't done enough with his life. He hadn't seen that what he had in common with the world--with the trunks of trees and the marching columns of ants and green shoots corkscrewing up from the mud--was life: the first light that sent every living thing paddling forth into the world every day. He wouldn't die--he couldn't. He was, only now, remembering how to live. Something in him wanted to sing out, wanted to shout: I'm lost completely, lost utterly. The shingling, coarse bark of a tree, raindrops plunking on the leaves, the sound of a toad moaning a love song somewhere nearby: all of it seemed terribly beautiful to him.

it, Valmont found himself staring at her. At the easy, languid way in which she crossed the floor; of the taut perfection of her figure, which, without being conspicuously on show beneath the soft folds of her white summer dress, was not entirely hidden by it either. It struck him as a calculated statement; both ambiguous and provocative without being obvious. This subtlety pleased him. Although finely boned and petite, she possessed bearing and composure; a certain reckless enjoyment of her own body. And her face was equally striking, with large feline eyes and full lips, poised on the verge of a smile, as if she were recalling a private joke. Her hair was black. It was brushed back from her face and arranged like a soft dusky halo round her head. A little straw handbag dangled from her wrist and she frowned slightly as she made her way up to the front desk.

Still dark. The Alpine hush is miles deep. The skylight over Holly’s bed is covered with snow, but now that the blizzard’s stopped I’m guessing the stars are out. I’d like to buy her a telescope. Could I send her one? From where? My body’s aching and floaty but my mind’s flicking through the last night and day, like a record collector flicking through a file of LPs. On the clock radio, a ghostly presenter named Antoine Tanguay is working through Nocturne Hour from three till four A.M. Like all the best DJs, Antoine Tanguay says almost nothing. I kiss Holly’s hair, but to my surprise she’s awake: “When did the wind die down?” “An hour ago. Like someone unplugged it.” “You’ve been awake a whole hour?” “My arm’s dead, but I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Idiot.” She lifts her body to tell me to slide out. I loop a long strand of her hair around my thumb and rub it on my lip. “I spoke out of turn last night. About your brother. Sorry.” “You’re forgiven.” She twangs my boxer shorts’ elastic. “Obviously. Maybe I needed to hear it.” I kiss her wound-up hair bundle, then uncoil it. “You wouldn’t have any ciggies left, perchance?” In the velvet dark, I see her smile: A blade of happiness slips between my ribs. “What?” “Use a word like ‘perchance’ in Gravesend, you’d get crucified on the Ebbsfleet roundabout for being a suspected Conservative voter. No cigarettes left, I’m ’fraid. I went out to buy some yesterday, but found a semiattractive stalker, who’d cleverly made himself homeless forty minutes before a whiteout, so I had to come back without any.” I trace her cheekbones. “Semiattractive? Cheeky moo.” She yawns an octave. “Hope we can dig a way out tomorrow.” “I hope we can’t. I like being snowed in with you.” “Yeah well, some of us have these job things. Günter’s expecting a full house. Flirty-flirty tourists want to party-party-party.” I bury my head in the crook of her bare shoulder. “No.” Her hand explores my shoulder blade. “No what?” “No, you can’t go to Le Croc tomorrow. Sorry. First, because now I’m your man, I forbid it.” Her sss-sss is a sort of laugh. “Second?” “Second, if you went, I’d have to gun down every male between twelve and ninety who dared speak to you, plus any lesbians too. That’s seventy-five percent of Le Croc’s clientele. Tomorrow’s headlines would all be BLOODBATH IN THE ALPS AND LAMB THE SLAUGHTERER, and the a vegetarian-pacifist type, I know you wouldn’t want any role in a massacre so you’d better shack up”—I kiss her nose, forehead, and temple—“with me all day.” She presses her ear to my ribs. “Have you heard your heart? It’s like Keith Moon in there. Seriously. Have I got off with a mutant?” The blanket’s slipped off her shoulder: I pull it back. We say nothing for a while. Antoine whispers in his radio studio, wherever it is, and plays John Cage’s In a Landscape. It unscrolls, meanderingly. “If time had a pause button,” I tell Holly Sykes, “I’d press it. Right”—I press a spot between her eyebrows and up a bit—“there. Now.” “But if you did that, the whole universe’d be frozen, even you, so you couldn’t press play to start time again. We’d be stuck forever.” I kiss her on the mouth and blood’s rushing everywhere. She murmurs, “You only value something if you know it’ll end.

I don’t know what it was about menopause, specifically, that caused me all of a sudden to become a gatherer of “found objects.” But now, wherever I went in this bleakly untamed and often inhospitable landscape in the wild western extremes of Ireland, I seemed to hear things calling out to me. I was rooting for something — I didn’t know what. For fragments of myself, perhaps; my life, my loves. For fragments which reflected something of myself back at me — whatever I might be becoming now, at this turbulent, shapeshifting time of my life. And all the fragments I seemed to need came from this new place, from the ancient, uncompromising earth around me: that land which I walked compulsively, day after day after day. I would come home from the woods reverently carrying strangely shaped sticks, from the lough with pebbles and water-bird feathers, from the beach with seashells and mermaid’s purses — as if I were reassembling myself from elements of the land itself. After the deep dissolutions of menopause, I was refashioning myself from those calcinated ashes; I was growing new bones. It’s something we all have to do at this time in our lives; somehow, with whatever tools are available to us, we have to begin to curate the vision of the elder we will become. It’s an act of bricolage. And so now I had become like the bright-eyed, cackling magpies which regularly ransacked our garden: a collector — though not of trinkets, but of clues. I was gathering them together in the safety of my new nest. The clues were there in the pieces; those clues are threaded through this book. Scattered in shadowy corners and brightly lit windows, these objects I’ve selected are so much more than random gatherings of whatever it was that I happened to come across in my wanderings. They’re so much more than mere clutter. They are active choices, carefully selected objects that mirror my sense of myself as a shapeshifting, storied creature. Because the clues to our re-memberings are in the stories, and the stories are always born from the land.

Stanton clawed his way to the bedside table and managed to grab his knife. He jabbed it into Rhyme. Once, twice. But the only places he could reach were the criminalist's legs and arms. It's pain that incapacitates and pain was one thing to which Lincoln Rhyme was immune.

unidentified serial perpetrators on the loose like the “Long Island Killer” suspected in as many as thirteen recent murders, the “Bone Collector” linked to thirteen murders in New Mexico, or the “February 9 Killer” who has killed at least two women in Salt Lake City on the same date in different years.ix The

You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should've seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if metallurgy report wasn't in your hands ASAP there'd be one mean mother——you get the picture——reaming their——you get the rest of the picture.

Rhyme

True love is exactly what she warned us it would be: strength and fragility all at once. True love can fortify a person or it can shatter them mindlessly. We who experience it, truly feel it in the depths of our bones and the strands of each hair, often allow it to color our field of vision.

If you’re going to get by in life, you’re going to have to learn to give up the dead.

While that’s good to know,” I said as I approached him and laid my hand on his flank, “I do want your opinion. After all, we’re a team. Like Ash and Pikachu.” “I do not know who they are,” Ffamran said as he considered my words. “They’re very powerful warriors from my world who traveled all over the world, defeating monsters until they were the very best that ever lived,” I replied with a smirk. “And they were very best friends.” “Ah,” Ffamran said with a nod. “Well, then you should know that this isn’t exactly a fair thing to ask of me, Martin.” He nodded to King Atlus. “After all, I very much wish to defeat Hennar and see his bones ground into dust, so I would have no problem allying myself with King Atlus.” My dragon turned his gaze back to me. “This is why you should decide what we should do as my judgment is clouded by revenge.

didn’t seem to be the nickname sort. Beautiful people rarely were. ‘Let’s

you can have something, hold it in your hands or feel it in your bones, and still never understand the working mechanisms behind it.” Isn’t

What’d he do? Your stepfather?

who

Jess herself had not eaten fowl or roast or even fish in years, but the books awakened memories of turkey and thick gravy, and crab cakes, and rib-eye roasts. Redolent of smoke and flame, the recipes repelled and also reminded her of pink and tender meat, and breaking open lobster dripping with sweet butter, and sucking marrow out of the bones.

My friend Jeffrey Deaver, successful author of The Bone Collector and many other thrillers, confessed once that his first short story, written as a child, was a Bond-inspired spy adventure (he refused to let me read it . . . afraid, maybe, that I might try to publish it as The Bond Collector).

it sticks to your bones for years, even decades.

sticks to your bones for years, even decades. That sense of the thing can cause as much damage as the original trauma, as life goes on.

The office, high above downtown Manhattan, looked out over Jersey. The crap in the air made the sunset absolutely beautiful.

Sometimes you just find yourself standing in need to do something. No matter it seems hopeless.

Be hold, i will cause breath to enter you

Straight boys are sweaty and they smell bad and they’re mean and only care about sex. Girls are pretty and soft and they smell nice. There’s really no comparison.

We got pizza for reading twenty books over summer vacation in middle school, but the U.S. Government can’t feed us for eliminating a hostile threat? Wow.

This is a school for assassins, and I’m the weirdo for asking if we get to kill a real person? Okay.

You only fuck men who get mail from AARP, so shut the fuck up.

Who’s cleaning up this mess?” Park asked Boone. “They are,” he said, pointing to the kids. Groans sounded around the whole room. “Oh, come on. You made us clean up after Aspen and now, we have to clean this, too?” Morgan whined, flopping onto one of the gym mats. Boone sighed. “Fine. Just this once, I’ll let the professionals handle it. But you will learn proper body disposal. Got it?” “Yes, sir,” they all said in unison. Boone rolled his eyes. “Okay, go to bed. It’s late.

Kendrick fiddled with his tie. “Well, if you get caught…we won’t help you. We will disavow all knowledge of you.” “You can’t do that,” Lennon said. “Yeah, our parents are loaded,” Moses said. “People know we go to school here,” Diego added. “My mom has three TONY awards,” Dove said wistfully. “And I’m too pretty for prison.

When are you just going to admit you want your ‘big bro’ to bang you like a pinky toe on a coffee table?

Payton sat up, not dislodging Dove. “What about you? Are you secretly a lesbian, too?” he asked Morgan. Morgan rolled her eyes. “Gender is a construct. I don’t really care what people have in their pants as long as they can get me off and don’t get clingy.” “Way to have standards,” Payton teased. Morgan gave him an imperious look. “You only fuck men who get mail from AARP, so shut the fuck up.” “Hey, you’d be surprised how much those discounts save on hotel rooms,” Payton quipped back.

Payton said Park needed to be shocked out of his romantic coma. And this plan was the equivalent of taking those little paddles they used to shock people back into a normal heart rhythm and putting them directly over Park’s dick.

Park turned the full force of his attention on him, looking him over, before his gaze settled on his lips. “Why did you ask me about my virginity?” ‘Cause I want you to fuck me, moron. Gift rubbed at his earlobe, trying to sound nonchalant. “Research, maybe?

I should have known it would all come back to you.” Kendrick sneered. “You’re the worst thing that ever happened to me. My biggest mistake.” Someone gasped from beside Gift but he wasn’t sure who. Aiden, however, just laughed. “Oh, come on. I’m almost positive that you haven’t experienced the worst thing to ever happen to you. But you’re about to.

You can’t let the feelings faction get to you.

Poor hia,” Gift taunted. “Just trying to do a good deed and now your new ward is out to seduce you. It’s very Jane Eyre.

There’s only one man deadlier than you when it comes to poisons and he retired to live out his life with his assassin husband. It was quite the scandal.

Do you believe in the red string story?” he asked suddenly. Park leaned into his space once more, so close it made Gift slightly cross-eyed. “The one that says the gods tied a red string around the ankles of those destined to find each other in every life? I don’t know.

Okay, hia,” Gift said, deliberately putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, calling Park an asshole.

five year old a leash attached to a dog with a taste for human blood. It might be alright for a little while, but eventually, that dog was going to go rogue and that five year old didn’t stand a chance.

The sea was a collector of things. It took things we cherished—most things we’d forgotten—and I still found myself drawn to her, unable to resist her call, needing to step into the graveyard of the lost, wild, and treasured.

The papers named him the West Mesa Bone Collector and named the girls transient and troubled and missing for years.

The sea was a collector of things.

This guy’s a pussy, she thought. I know that ’cause he’s saying everything I want to.

Already sweating though it was just nine in the morning, Amelia Sachs pushed through a stand of tall grass. She was walking the strip search—what the Crime Scene people called it—an S-shaped pattern. Nothing. She bent her head to the speaker/mike pinned to her navy-blue uniform blouse.

Why did you ask me about my virginity?” ‘Cause I want you to fuck me, moron.