Sara Paretsky Quotes
-
The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.
-
But what I've learned is, when your adrenaline is flowing, you can do a lot. I'm not very physical, but once some punks were trying to break into my house and I chased them down.
-
The hope for a messiah puts too much on that one person. And you think that absolves you of personal responsibility and you don't have to act because that person will do it for you.
-
I live and die with the Chicago Cubs
-
I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.
-
I love to sing. I'm a soprano.
-
I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.
-
I cannot find words to express the depth of my loss or outrage about what's happening to this country. I don't know if I can find the words for it, but if this country ever recovers, it will not be in my lifetime. If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there.
-
When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.'
-
Most people don't have the money to spend on advertising to create awareness among readers, nor do they have the contacts at newspapers or magazines to get their books reviewed.
-
I'm lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life with
-
Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.
-
The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.
-
Live disasters are wonderful attractions when you're safe on the other side of them.
-
I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science.
-
It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating
-
There is no frigate like a book and no harbor like a library, where those who love books but can't afford their own complete collections, or those who need a computer, or kids who need a safe place to read after school, or moms with toddlers who want their babies to learn to read, can all come together and share in a great community resource.
-
Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing.
-
Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.
-
I admire about Hillary: Every time I am going to walk away from her candidacy, I think, she has absorbed more hate than anyone I can think of over the past twenty years, and she hasn't cracked under it. That's a kind of iron fortitude that maybe we need in the President of the United States. People project on to Hillary because she is a woman. They either hate her for everything they hate about women or they long for her to be everything they want in a woman. It's an impossible burden.
-
I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time
-
Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.
-
I'm jealous of everyone discovering Lovesey and Diamond for the first time-you have a wonderful backlist to catch up on. Me, all I can do is wait for the next book.
-
White-collar crime gets more outrageous by the second in America.