Karin Slaughter Quotes

You can take my heart, but I can't let you take my dog.

Reading is not just an escape. It is access to a better way of life.

Considering what Pauline's been through . . ." Will began, then stopped himself. "She's not very nice." "She's a cold-blooded bitch." "I'm surprised I haven't fallen in love with her.

You didn't realize what was passing you by until you slowed down a little bit to get a better look.

Because I said so." She paused again. "Sweetheart, I know you're an adult, but adults are like vampires. The older ones are much more powerful.

Nothing ever truly faded. Time only dulled the edges.

Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.

Optimism is a sliver of glass in your heart.

There is kindness in so many unexpected places

Your mother and I had always been secretly pleased that you were so headstrong and passionate about your causes. Once you were gone, we understood that these were the qualities that painted young men as smart and ambitious and young women as trouble.

A man who has grown up in an orphanage cannot take a dog to the pound. Even if it is a Chihuahua.

He said that children always have different parents, even in the same family.

Her father always said that the price for hearing gossip was having someone else gossip about you.

Anybody could be smart. It took a special somebody to be clever.

What a rapist takes from a woman is her future. The person she is going to become, who she is supposed to be, is gone. In many ways, it's worse than murder, because he has killed that potential person, eradicated that potential life, yet she still lives and breathes, and has to figure out another way to thrive.

I’ve always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart

I’ve got to figure out before I die whether I want to be happy or I want to be right.

It is a father’s job to love his daughter in the way that she needs to be loved.

It's the truth. I'm sorry to be blunt about it, but girls don't like guys who are doormats. Especially pretty girls, because there's no novelty in it. Guys are hitting on them all of the time. They can't walk down the street or order a coffee or stand on a corner without some idiot making a comment about how attractive they are. And the women smile because it's easier than telling them to go fuck themselves. And less dangerous, because if a man rejects a woman, she goes home and cries for a few days. If a woman rejects a man, he can rape and kill her.

Love doesn't keep you in a constant state of turmoil. It gives you peace.

A trial is nothing but a competition to tell the best story. Whoever sways the jury wins the trial.

You can only make decisions with the information you have at the time

People did not change their basic, core personalities. Their values tended to stay the same.

because if a man rejects a woman, she goes home and cries for a few days. If a woman rejects a man, he can rape and kill her.

Many people must have told you that you are lucky to be alive. I think you would have been lucky had you not been shot in the first place.

Having a teenager is like having a really, really shitty roommate. They eat all your food and steal your clothes and take money out of your purse and borrow your car without asking.

sometimes, your world turns upside down, and you need somebody to show you how to walk on your hands before you can find your feet again.

He had always told her that winners only competed with themselves.

a Democrat is a Republican who’s been through the criminal justice system.

Sometimes, even if you know the answer, you've got to let the other person take a shot. If they feel wrong all the time, they never get the chance to feel right.

Sara studied him. "Is that a Chihuahua behind your back?" "No, I'm just happy to see you" Sara gave him a confused smile, and he reluctantly showed her Betty.

I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: that restless feeling dissolves like butter.

When somebody dies, you forget they're an asshole.

She took him for granted sometimes. That was the luxury of a long marriage. But she knew that she loved him. She needed him. He was the anchor that kept her from drifting away.

They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds. —Mexican Proverb

You couldn't turn on the TV without hearing about the missing teenage girl. Sixteen years old. White. Middle class. Very pretty. No one ever seemed quite as outraged when an ugly woman went missing.

No matter what happened to you, no matter what horrors you endured when you were taken away, you will always be my pretty little girl.

A woman can run faster with her skirt up than a man can with his pants down.

He always took lateness as being rude. It said to the other person that their time was more valuable than yours.

Given enough idleness & time, she could talk herself into either loving or hating the man

Forever was never as long as you thought it was.

I loved him. I know you don’t want to believe that, but I really, truly, giddy, heart-breaking, longing, achingly loved him.

Marriage. That’s what he called it, though men like Paul do not marry women. They own them. They control them. They are voracious gluttons who devour every part of a woman, then clean their teeth with the bones.

You could only ever see a thing when you were standing outside of it.

Every place always has somebody who doesn’t fit in. That’s what makes them fit in.

She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language she could not understand

Dyadic completion,” Paul would’ve told Claire. “The human brain tends to assume that, if there’s a victim, there has to be a villain.

. . . he was about as forthcoming as an amnesiac with lockjaw.

You don’t understand how the world works. That there are consequences you can’t predict. That bad choices, bad deeds, can corrupt you.

I've always preferred crazy to stupid. Stupid can break your heart.

If you wanted to know shit about a woman, all you had to do was ask the woman who was pretending to be her friend.

Sweetheart, I know you’re an adult, but adults are like vampires. The older ones are much more powerful.

Proactive interference,” Paul would have explained. “It’s when previously acquired information inhibits our ability to process new information.

It’s very important for your life to have meaning. Even on the days it makes you unhappy, you still need a purpose.

A few years ago when she'd read Paul several passages from Fifty Shades of Grey, they'd both giggled like teenagers. "The biggest fantasy in that book," Paul had said, "is that he changes in the end.

I can’t—” Lena repeated. “I can’t do it. I can’t live without him.” Sara gently pulled her hand away from Jared’s. She smoothed down the sheet, tucked it in close around his side. She looked at Lena—really looked at her straight in the eye. “Good,” Sara told her. “Now you know how it feels.

somewhere on earth, there was always a book with an answer in it, and the best way to find that answer was to read every book you could get your hands on.

As hard as it was to hold on to things, it was even harder to let them go.

Men can always reinvent themselves,” Laura said. “For women, once you’re a mother, you’re always a mother.

It didn't take a Harvard economist to figure out that it'd be a hell of a lot cheaper spending money on helping keep kids safe when they were younger than it was to put them in jail when they were older. That was the American way, though. Spend a million dollars rescuing some kid who's fallen down a well, but God forbid you spend a hundred bucks up front to cap the well so the kid never falls down it in the first place.

In a rare moment of candor, he had once told her that being in a library was like sitting down at a table laid with all his favorite foods but not being able to eat any of them. And he hated himself for it.

I miss anonymity. People have a right to disappear if they want to. It’s a personal decision, isn’t it? Everyone should have autonomy. We owe it to them as fellow human beings to support their decisions, even if we do not agree with them.

In her defense, her helicoptering tended to revolve around making sure that Dee could take care of herself. LEARN HOW TO TAKE OUT THE TRASH OR I WILL KILL YOU. LOVE MOM.

Lydia supposed his headstone had been ordered. Something large and garish made of the finest marble and phallic shaped because being dead didn't stop you from being a dick.

Broken: Never underestimate the power of a shared history.

That's the problem with life, Sam. If you're not rising, you're falling.

If you love someone, you don’t go out of your way to hurt them. You don’t torture them. You don’t terrify them or make them live in constant fear. That’s not how love works. It’s not how normal people work.

He had always said there was nothing that a list couldn’t solve. Conquer the details and you conquer the problem.

You didn’t help chop up a two-hundred-fifty-pound man and still graduate at the top of your class without learning how to compartmentalize.

I’m not sure,” Callie said. “As you know, cats choose not to talk because they’re afraid we’ll make them pay taxes.

Will had found out the hard way that it’s nearly impossible to go to sleep with a flatulent Chihuahua sharing your pillow.

Will always assumed that when people insisted they weren’t lying about a particular thing, that meant they were lying about something else.

And now, when she looked in the mirror and saw a new line on her own face,a new wrinkle, all she could think was that she was growing old without him

I still want it to die. Like immediately. With fire.

He was playing chess and she was sucking at checkers.

Neither of us will ever move forward if we are always looking back.

Men never have to be uncomfortable around women. Women have to be uncomfortable around men all of the time.

She had dozens, even hundreds, of friends, but not one single person knew all of the pieces of her.

I told him before all of this happened was that holding on to that kind of grudge was like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.

Some people are born with a hole inside them. They spend their lives trying to fill it. Sometimes it's pills, sometimes it's Jesus.

Claire had realized a long time ago that if you lie with enough conviction, you can usually fool yourself.

Then again, Paul had once told her that there was no such thing as coincidence. “The Law of Truly Large Numbers provides that given a large enough sample size, any outrageous thing can happen.

Maybe that's why Claire had perfected the art of invisibility. It was a form of self-preservation. You couldn't resent what you could not see. She was so quiet, but she noticed everything. Her eyes tracked the world like it was a book written in a language that she could not understand. There was nothing timorous about her, but you got the feeling that she always had one foot out the door. If the situation got too hard, or too intense, she would simply disappear.

Talking of the local Sheriff, Jake Valentine, tall and skinny and his wife Myra, "She was a short woman, maybe five feet tall in her socks, the top of her head not quite reaching Jake's chest. What she lacked in height she made up for in girth. Jeffrey guessed she was at least a hundred pounds overweight. Standing side by side, the Valentines looked like the living embodiment of the number ten.

Sara was reminded of yet another one of Will's traits, which was that he had an uncanny knack for keeping his mouth shut when he didn't know what to say. This resulted in the sort of awkward moments that made Sara's dating life look downright ebullient.

The world stops for you when you’re pretty. That’s why women spend billions on crap for their faces. Their whole life, they’re the center of attention. People want to be around them just because they’re attractive. Their jokes are funnier. Their lives are better. And then suddenly, they get bags under their eyes or they put on a little weight and no one cares about them anymore. They cease to exist.

Rage had consumed her. She hadn’t wanted to just murder him. She had wanted to empty her gun into his chest. And then she wanted to fill the holes with burning oil and dance in his still-warm blood. She had felt dead inside.

Everybody felt that history was like a book, a beginning, a middle and an end. That’s not how it worked. Real life was all middle.

You’ve fallen into the habit of feeling low. You can get used to anything, especially bad things. But the only direction now is up. You can’t fall off the floor.

Your relationship with a person doesn’t end when they die. It only gets stronger.” He winked at her. “Mostly because they’re not there to tell you that you’re wrong.

His words hung between them, and Faith tried to pin down when exactly their relationship had gone from cooly professional to personal. There was something so kind about him under his awkward manners and social ineptness. Despite her best intentions, Faith realised that she could not hate Will Trent.

Suddenly, quite miraculously, you are a grown-up beautiful woman. You look so much like your mother, but you are still uniquely you. You have thoughts I will never know. Desires I will never understand. Friends I will never meet. Passions I will never share. You have a life. You have an entire world in front of you.

he recognized Donald Trump’s picture on the jacket and assumed it was a get-rich-quick scheme. Obviously, Jake Berman hadn’t taken the man’s advice. Though, considering Berman had lost his job and declared bankruptcy, maybe he had.

People were outraged. They were glued to their televisions, to their web pages, to their Facebook feeds. They vocally expressed sorrow, horror, fury, pain. They cried for change. They raised money. They demanded action. And then they went back to their lives until the next one happened again.

Why is it that we always neglect the things that matter most? This is a universal question, because through the days and weeks and months and years after your disappearance, I understood that I did not cherish you enough. I never told you that I loved you enough. I never held you enough. I never listened to you enough. You

There were a few things she knew about Will Trent. He was tall, at least six-three, with a runner's lean body and the most beautiful legs she had ever seen on a man. His mother had been killed when he was less than a year old. He'd grown up in a children's home and never been adopted. He was a special agent with the GBI. He was one of the smartest men she had ever met, and he was so dyslexic that, as far as she could tell, he read no higher than a second-grade level.

That doesn’t sound invisible to me.” “I’m saying it wrong, then.” Lydia searched for a better way to explain. “She was always holding herself back. She was cocaptain, not captain. She could’ve dated the quarterback, but she dated his brother instead. She could’ve been top in her class, but she’d purposefully turn in a paper late or miss an assignment so she’d fall closer to the middle. She would know about Mauna Kea, but she would say Everest because winning would bring too much attention.

Will let out a long breath. "She leaves me a lot. That's what she does. She leaves, and then she comes back. And then she stays some and then she leaves again." "Where does she go?" "I have no idea." "You've never asked her?" "No." Sara Didn't pretend to understand. "Why not?". He glanced out into the street, watching the traffic zoom by. "It's complicated.

How I compare it to now is, at this moment we are all living through, everyone on earth is experiencing a suspension of loss. Over half a million people dead in the United States alone. The number is too overwhelming to accept, so we go on with our lives and we do what we can but, in the end, the staggering loss will be waiting for us. It always catches up to you, doesn’t it?

Curiosity broke her earlier resolve. "Have you ever been tested?" "No." He stood behind Sara, holding the camera in front so she could see. "Zoom here," he said, flicking the toggle. "You could probably-" "This is macro." "Will-" "Super macro." He kept talking over her until she gave up. "Here's where you adjust for color. This is light. Anti-shake. Red-eye." He clicked through the features like a photography instructor. Sara Finally relented. "Why don't I point and you shoot?" "All right." His back was stiff, and she could tell that he was irritated. "I'm sorry I-" "Please don't apologize." Sara held his gaze for a few moments longer, wishing she could fix this. There was nothing to say if he wouldn't even let her apologize.