Nevada Barr Quotes

perhaps love was like the mumps. If a woman came down with it after forty, it could kill her

Anna remembered her fifth grade teacher, Mr. White, telling her that hatred wasn't the worst of emotions. If one hated, one still cared. Indifference was the most inhuman.

Deliberately, she took a long drink. It wasn't as good as she remembered, but then little was. She caught herself in that thought and was ashamed. Cynicism was okay, bitterness a pain in the neck. The hairline difference between the two was hope and humor. The cynic had both, the embittered, nothing.

She was forty before she realized that when she asked a man what he was thinking and he said, “Nothing,” he wasn’t lying.

Anna… envied Joan’s deep connection with the human race. She was a member of the club. Anna was half convinced she’d been begotten by a passing alien life-form on a human woman. It was as good an explanation as any for the sense she had of being an outsider.

From long experience she knew that she wore her loneliness like armor. Very few people ever recognized it for what it was. To the casual observer it looked very much like arrogance. Sometimes it was.

Hers was an evil-sounding chuckle that Anna loved. The sort of chortle Dorothy might have heard shortly before all hell broke loose in the land of Oz

when she was a young woman she valued intelligence over all other human attributes. Now that she was older she valued kindness.

In a world that is becoming increasingly virtual, the parks remain places of visceral beauty. Places where we can remember that we are but a small part of the life on this planet, and that it is a truly wonderful planet and the only one we've got.

The story is, a man came up to Yosemite and the ranger was sitting at the front gate and the man said, "I've only got one hour to see Yosemite. If you only had one hour to see Yosemite, what would you do?" And the ranger said, "Well, I'd go right over there, and I'd sit on that rock, and I'd cry." - Nevada Barr

I can't believe how many students don't read. They want to be writers, but they haven't read anything at all. They have looked at book covers, which usually allows them enough expertise to sneer, but they haven't read the books. How many young poets "don't like" poetry? How many fiction writers don't know Lehane from Nevada Barr?

My definition of forgiveness is a sigh, very like a sigh of relief, on which the memory of evil is breathed out. With letting go of the memory, discontinuing the incessant replaying of pain, and instead feeling the unmitigated overness of the evil, the evildoer often looks quite different: flawed, like me, a child of God, like me. Forgiven, like me.

As she drove the Trace, each curve revealing a scene rich with life and as picturesque as illustrations from a children's book, Anna was struck again by the beauty of the state. Over her years as a Yankee and a Westerner, she'd heard Mississippi described many ways. Beautiful had never been one of them.

you use your whole body like you did when you played as a kid. Grown-up amusements don’t allow for crawling and wriggling, getting good and muddy, and tearing the knees of your pants.

...she couldn't decide which was worse: pending alcoholism, or remorseless unrelenting sobriety of the rest of her days.

The batteries in his radio died and came back so often they could have had regular roles on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

When she finally found her way onto the Trace, the sun was rising and, with it, her spirits. The Natchez Trace Parkway, a two lane road slated, when finished to run from Nashville, Tennessee, to Natchez, Mississippi, had been the brainchild of the Ladies' Garden Clubs in the South. Besides preserving a unique part of the nations past,...the Trace would not be based on spectacular scenery but would conserve the natural and agricultural history of Mississippi.

Like many people who lasted any length of time in the rescue professions, she'd worn out the 'if' factor pretty quickly. You were where you were. You went where you went. You did what you could. Mostly, people were better off after you showed up than before.

Anna was too old to believe that people always lied for a reason. Mostly they lied because it was easy, felt good, or was habit.

Ghosts were not the spirits of the dead returning but the memories of the living not yet laid to rest.

Trying to second-guess lunatics, drunks, or the Office of Personnel Management was an exercise in frustration. The logic totally eluded her.

Bureaucrats -- monkeys who hear no evil and see no evil -- are first in line for promotion.

You’ve got to stay in the game. Your luck’s bound to change. Be a shame to miss it,

One cannot be kind in any meaningful way over any length of time without also being good.

By the time they reached the Queens Highway turnoff, Anna found she liked Sheila more in memoriam that she would’ve guessed.

Whoever had come up with the chant “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me” had been an idiot.

Criminals were a lazy bunch. If they weren’t, they’d get their MBAs and rob with impunity.

Anna took her solace where she always did. The smell of the earth, the touch of the sky held for her a special alchemy, able to turn loneliness into aloneness, and so make it, if not sacred, at least bearable.

Prison would kill him. Not neatly or cleanly or quickly, It would kill him with ten thousand days of gray, each taking a bite of his sanity until all that remained was huddled terror with the body of a man wrapped around it.

For a while they sat without talking. Anna got her daypack and dug out a paperback copy of Ivanhoe. It produced a book’s inevitable effect. In cats it stimulated the urge to sit on the pages. In humans it stimulated conversation.

Anna drove with the window rolled down, breathing in the essence of autumn: an exhalation of a forest readying itself for sleep, a smell so redolent with nostalgia a pleasant ache warmed her bones and she was nagged with the sense of a loss she could not remember.

Part of her soul ... gloried in the sheer bodacious unnaturalness of it. Putting a great blue-green water park smack down in the red desert complete with cactus, trading posts, genuine Navajo Indians, and five kinds of rattlesnakes was theater of the absurd at its most outrageous.

Gossip, unless aimed or honed sharp like a weapon, was natural to human beings. It showed interestin oe's fellows, interest in the well being of the tribe. "Gossip was a way to learn taboos, pass on warnings, share the burden fo being human among many so the onus of bearing it alone would fall on no one person. " Molly said. From an Anna Pigeon Novel

With the Regional Office breathing down her neck... Corinne had wanted to keep the Drury case low-key, uncontroversial. since Craig's disappearance had set he alarm bells off, Anna was willing to be she'd change tactics, make a noisy show of taking command of the situation. For a while the name of the game at Guadalupe Mountains would be Cover Your Ass.

Dead strangers evoked a smorgasbord of the lesser emotions and served as marvelous educational tools, warnings, and veiled threats. When an acquaintance was killed, it was closer to home; one knew some of the threads that tied the deceased to a common humanity. Without enough real connection to grieve, one was left in an uncomfortable place between curiosity and embarrassment.

A thousand "tells" were broadcast every minute: a tic, a wince, a smell, a shadow, a draft, a flick of the hand, a door ajar. The human senses experienced them all. The human brain registered them. The human monkey mind, clamoring with the shouting littles of life, was lucky if it recognized one or two. The message from the gestalt trickled down in intuition, gut feelings, geese walking on one's grave, deja vu.

Like many abuse victims, he carried the shame of the abuser, taking their malfeasance as an indication of personal worthlessness.

Though she knew she was not personally responsible for the collective sins of the world, she couldn’t shake a creeping shame for enslaving Africans, decimating the American Indian tribes, annihilating the passenger pigeon, building strip malls on California’s beaches and leaving behind unsightly junk on the face of the moon. Clintus

Mismatched images of violence and guns and God made the South a strange land and Anna a stranger in it.

Men and women in the United States carried a terrific burden

A cipher, Anna thought, one of those people who by choice or genetics is incapable of stirring up much emotion.

Maybe that was why Anna admired people with passion. A person’s passion told a lot about who they were. Those without passions seemed to have a hollow place inside. One never knew what grew in that darkness.

somewhat resemble Dickens’s garbage sifter, who lived in a shack surrounded by mountains of refuse.

it was harder than others to remember that evil was still front page news. Goodness and order were so much the norm they needn’t be reported.

To name a thing was to own, control and understand it.

of anger against the other gender for reasons Anna could never fathom.

Anna hung up none the wiser but feeling better for having talked with like-minded people.

Anna’d been born female, she’d grown into a small woman and, in the past ten years, had slid into middle age. If ever there was a cloak of invisibility, time and circumstances were trying to weave her one.

What’s the use of being given a load of manure if you don’t spread it around?

All cats were divine till proven otherwise; all dogs were suspect until cleared.

Man was the animal who created. Like the God in whose image he was supposedly made, he created his own heaven and his own hell.

Rape was about violence, hate and dominance. Sex had little to do with it.

Christianity, in its fundamental state, brought not only the Heavenly Host into the homes of its adherents but a counterbalancing army of The Fallen. The devil was part of a package deal.

Breathing deep of air so dry and thin it burned her lungs, she wondered why life wasn’t enough for most people, why they had to hide in cathedrals, mosques and temples and rehearse human-born fictions of something yet to come, practice infinite subtleties of castigation of flesh and mind, as if by limiting pleasure and freedom in their one guaranteed existence they might earn kudos in another, one from which no explorers had ever returned alive.

It crossed her mind to take the pledge, go on the wagon, but she couldn’t decide which was worse: pending alcoholism, or remorseless unrelenting sobriety of the rest of her days.

A little wine is good for the soul.” “A lot is better.

The virus needed certain conditions in which to grow; its victims had to be willing to believe; they had to want, on some level, maybe even unbeknownst to themselves, to do what the virus would tell them to do. And they had to be greedy: for profit, for importance, for revenge, for entertainment, for adventure. Only the greedy could be effectively conned. One never read of en masters being taken in by scams. They didn’t crave anything, and, therefore, con artists couldn’t set the hook.

In the lowlands around Lake Superior weather fronts, with their attendant changes in pressure, gave her headaches. Not so the mountain storms. Cracking thunder and flashing lightning filled the air with ozone till it tingled in the lungs, rejuvenating body and spirit much the same as the air at the seaside or near waterfalls.

Humans were herd animals, like the moose. Sometimes even the most independent needed to clump up, hip and shoulder touching, protecting their soft flanks from the wolves.

paddock. “Will do,” Anna said, feeling mildly miffed. In her mind she heard her tiny, mean, long-dead grandmother cackling: “Think you’re so important? Put your finger in a bucket of water, pull it out and see how big a hole it leaves.

Anna’s illusion of control had been smashed years before with the sudden, meaningless death of her husband. In the years since, she’d made an effort not to give in to the need to put the pieces back together, but to see and know and accept with some degree of grace that life is meaningless. There is no Grand Plan. Everything doesn’t happen for the best. One can knock till one’s knuckles are bloody and the door may not be opened.

A lot of people went through life feeling they’d been ripped off. The money, the good jobs, the beautiful women, the rich husbands, had been snatched away from them, given to the wrong people.

jealousy was not about caring, it was about fear of loss: loss of love, loss of power, or loss of security.

As a lover of the theater, Anna had been fascinated by what drove the human heart to self-destruct. That was over. Now all she cared about was that they be stopped.

don’t want to come back as a seasonal interpreter,” Anna said finally. Jenny looked crestfallen. “I don’t blame you for that,” Steve said. “Let me know when you’d like your last day to be and I’ll get to work on the paperwork.” “No, I’m staying,” Anna said. “I want to come back in law enforcement.

Evil, true evil, in her—and, more scientifically, her psychiatrist sister’s—belief, fed on despair, the kind that suffocates every glimmer of light and life beneath a cold so intense it becomes darkness.

Rogelio has a feminine side,” Anna countered. “From what you’ve told me, Rogelio has a weak side. Not at all the same.

In the end Christina may have been sorry she asked Anna along. To Alison’s great delight, Anna’s expert advice was two kittens, so they could play together when she was away at the sitter’s all day.

...she was realist enough to admit women made things more complicated, more volatile. Not because women were stupid or incompetent but because their presence often made men stupid and incompetent.

Sharing beauty with total strangers made the world seem a friendlier place. In a culture dominated, if not by violence, then certainly by overheated reports of it dished out by a ratings-starved news media, it reassured her that the love of peace and natural order was still extant in the human soul.

One of the reasons humans tended toward insanity was the weight of fear they carried. The blessings of storytelling, the handing down of knowledge and warnings, had a flip side. People carried the collective fears of their history, the biases of those long dead, the paranoias of other ages. Anna flashed

what we have done is unacceptable.

over the

Soon she was going to have to relinquish her self-image as a hermit.

A person’s passion told a lot about who they were. Those without passions seemed to have a hollow place inside. One never knew what grew in that darkness.

To be human was to be melodramatic, to feel things acutely, love and hate and lust, to search for the Holy Grail, outrun the other kids in the fifty-yard dash and care mightily about it.

shock of black hair. “Or are rangers’ sex drives too low?” “IQs are too

—Nevada Barr, author of The Rope “This

Another terrific reason for not having children: it was so disturbing when animals ate them.

American mythology would have it that divorced or widowed women in their middle years were desperate to remarry. That had not been Polly's experience. Most had made lives they enjoyed and would only compromise for a very shiny white knight with a particularly breathtaking steed.

...but he was big and, superwoman or not, Anna knew when all else was equal, big won. Young won. The point was to make sure all else was as unequal as possible.

Worry about right and wrong wasn’t a concept he embraced. Right and wrong were ephemerals; they changed from every angle, from hour to hour, depending on which side of any of a thousand borders a soldier was born.

The shame attached to rape was men’s shame, shame they were too weak to carry: that their gender could do this, that they could do it, that they wanted to do it, that they could not protect their wives and sisters and daughters from it, that they could not stop it. That a thing they believed to be solely theirs could be taken by another man. That, should a child be born, the cuckold would be left to raise another man’s bastard.

EMTs learned to love brave patients--they weren't nearly such a pain in the ass as the whiners--but not to trust them. In the name of courage, they would hide symptoms, not ask for help when there was help hovering around them anxious to give them succor...

Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.

bad vibes, an underlying sickness or misery that oozed out around the edges of conversations and interactions.

Since joining the National Park Service fourteen years ago, Anna had worked every Fourth of July. ... Winding her way through the masses, trying not to get her fragile frame jostled, she realized she preferred it that way. Working on holidays, one wasn't required to have fun. There was no pressure, no disappointments. And she usually had a wonderful time.

As a rule it offended her to be rescued, but this one time she would have welcomed it, been gracious even. And grateful. With staggering suddenness she felt lost, defeated, small and middle-aged, and hurt. This time she would die. To counteract this frailty of spirit, she picked up the ax and held it in her two hands, the handle across her chest. The blade, evil-looking and running red with the light from the fire, comforted her. The wooden handle felt warm and strong, the ax head heavy and sharp. Courage returned — or the last vestiges of reality departed. A dreamlike quality took over; a nightmare, but one experienced from the point of view of the monster. Anna was not afraid. She felt very little either internally or externally.

Words could hurt worse than any stone, and the bruises lasted longer. Harboring

Thigpen gave her that cringing, sly feeling incompetents in denial always engendered. In government service, she’d felt it enough times to trust her instincts. Randy

The exhilarating alignment of the heavens was sufficiently rare that she recognized her moment of joy, thus making the joy that much more potent.

In a culture dominated, if not by violence, then certainly by overheated reports of it dished out by a ratings-starved news media, it reassured her that the love of peace and natural order was still extant in the human soul.

Only humans, cursed with the knowledge of their own mortality and that of those whom they loved, were truly alone; each trapped in an ivory tower of skull and bone peeking out through the windows of the soul.     THE

Widowhood conferred a mystery and status divorce lacked. The difference between returning World War II and Vietnam veterans. Both had been through a war, but a judgmental public conferred glory only on those who had been victimized in a socially acceptable manner.

My life is a Stephen King novel,” she whispered. “Everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. When it finally can’t get any worse, everybody dies.

and foremost a park ranger. Stanton had nothing against park rangers. As a group

To let the living see the dead were most certainly dead and so to let them go. Ghosts were not the spirits of the dead returning but the memories of the living not yet laid to rest.

There hadn’t been a god for many years. Not the nightgownclad patriarch of Sunday school coloring books; not the sensitive young man with the inevitable auburn ringlets Anna had stared through in the stained-glass windows at Mass; not the many-armed and many-faceted deities of the Bhagavad Gita that she’d worshipped alongside hashish and Dustin Hoffman in her college days. Even the short but gratifying parade of earth goddesses that had taken her to their ample bosoms in her early thirties had gone, though she remembered them with more kindness than the rest. God was dead. Let Him rest in peace. Now, finally, the earth was hers with no taint of Heaven.

Women could sit with grief, hold its hands, watch it pour from the eyes of friends and children, lie down beside it and help it to rest. Their delicate strength would weave a net strong as spun steel, keep the widow Castle from hitting bottom.

It ain't gonna happen. You get a lot to learn about ranchers. We defend what's ours. From varmints and the goddam Park Service.