Sue Grafton Quotes
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Personally, I'd rather grow old alone than in the company of anyone I've met so far. I don't experience myself as lonely, incomplete, or unfulfilled, but I don't talk about that much. It seems to piss people off--especially men. (Kinsey Millhone)
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Sometimes the hardest part of my job is the incessant reminder of the fact we're all trying so assiduously to ignore: we are here temporarily. Life is only ours on loan.
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Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them." "I don't believe in ghosts," I said, faintly. "Some people can't see the color red. That doesn't mean it isn't there," she replied.
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You never know which people will affect your life.
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People in California seem to age at a different rate than the rest of the country. Maybe it's the passion for diet and exercise, maybe the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Or maybe we're afflicted with such a horror of aging that we've halted the process psychically.
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Insecure people have a special sensitivity for anything that finally confirms their own low opinion of themselves.
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I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.
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After my years in Hollywood, I got tired of apologizing for work that really wasn't mine to begin with.
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So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.
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Emotion doesn't travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view.
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I think you'd best make your peace with the past since you've come this far. I think you know by now that you won't go back again.
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If I'd been listening closely, I'd have caught the sound of the gods having a great big old tee-hee at my expense.
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There is no sound so terrible as a man's sorrow for his own death.
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If you're unhappy, change something.
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Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.
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Grade school was perilous. ... I can see how I must have worried them. I was the kind of kid who, for no apparent reason, wept piteously or threw up on myself. On an especially scary day, I sometimes did both.
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There's nothing quite as irksome as someone else's mess.
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The critical lessons in life hold sway whether you like it or not.
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Sometimes I claim I write because I put in an application at Sears and they've never called back.
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You try to keep life simple but it never works, and in the end all you have left is yourself.
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When all else fails, cleaning house is the perfect antidote to most of life's ills.
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My primary lesson, however, was that I'm a solo writer, happiest when I'm making all the executive decisions. I've always been willing to rise or fall on my own merits.
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Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
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Sometimes being fooled by love is worth the price. At least you know you're alive and capable of feeling, even if all you end up with is chest pain.