Quotes from Books I Read in 2003

"From where the two patrolmen sat in the patrol car parked at the curb, it seemed evident that the priest was winning the fight."

"The knife seemed to be a weapon of convenience, a small paring knife that evidently had been taken from the bartop where a bottle opener with a matching wooden handle sat beside a half-full pitcher of martinis, an ice bucket, and a whole lemon from which a narrow sliver of skin was missing."

"If you asked anyone in the city for directions to the Hamilton Bridge, they would invariably give you directions to the Alexander Hamilton Bridge. In fact, odds were nine-to-five that nobody in the city even knew there was a bridge simply called the Hamilton, less than a block long and spanning the Diamondback River, which incidentally became the River Dix a little further west--it was all very complicated, though not as complicated as the city of Bologna, Italy."

"To kill a man, however, is repugnant, even to a newspaper reporter who has gazed on plenty of examples of violent death. Yet, to frighten this fellow off, Harding concluded, was only to leave the mystery that seemed to surround himself and the silver Buddha farther than ever from its solution. On the other hand, if this were merely some common armed sneakthief, it wouldn't be the poorest civic action in the world to snuff him out here and now, and help bring Chicago one notch closer to second place in the various criminal tabulations of the world's most criminal cities."

"'Stop it!' screamed Jorgen. 'Shut your mouth right now! I will not have herring maligned! You may taunt us all you want, and your prattling does not bother me. But you leave the herring out of it.' The over ones of his vociferous rant bounced around the interior of the Volvo for a second, and then all was silent."

"'Ken,' said Eliot. 'This guy is amazing. He actually tried to use a trained pelican to kill Castro. Something went wrong, maybe the bomb malfunctioned, maybe the pelican got confused, but the thing apparently blew up outside a hotel in downtown Havana, sprayed pelican parts all over a bunch of French tourists, and the Cuban government claimed that it was some kind of atmospheric..."

"They'd looped around the back of the compound, met more manacled gardeners and orderlies, many hoeing a dark loam against the rear wall. One of the gardeners, a middle-aged woman with wispy wheat hair gone almost bald on top, stared at Teddy as he passed, and then raised a single finger to her lips. Teddy noticed a dark red scar, thick as licorice, that ran across her throat. She smiled, finger still held to her lips, and then shook her head very slowly at him."

"Are animals happy? they wondered. In George Johnston's book, Introduction to Conchology, he says of oysters, 'in due season, love visits even these phlegmatic things, when icy bosoms feel the secret fire,' but others in his field had doubts, the happiness of oysters being so hard to ascertain."

"A ruthless killer was loose within the grounds of a private sanitarium. He struck three times and might have made his escape, but a garden fountain was his Nemesis."