Laura Lippman Quotes & Sayings

I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of Hancock County, Georgia, had 42 slaves, 31 "employed in agriculture." Culver was my great-great-great grandfather. I carry this piece of paper with me every day because I don't want to forget. I don't know what to do with the information, but I don't want to forget it. — Laura Lippman

I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career. — Laura Lippman

Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war. — Laura Lippman

Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything. And if you could, you would wish you didn't. — Laura Lippman

I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college. — Laura Lippman

The young woman at his side surveyed Tess in one quick, lethal glance. Tess could almost hear her brain clicking away on the sort of points system that some women used: Taller - 1 point for her. Hippy - 1 point against. Big breasts, long hair - 2 points for. Hair, unstyled, worn in a braid down her back - 2 points against. Older than me - 3 points against. Face, okay. Clothes, not stylish, not embarrassing. Tess wasn't sure of her final score, but apparently it was just a little too high. The woman gave her a terrifyingly fake smile, one that suggested she had little experience with real ones, and held out her hand. — Laura Lippman

As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott. — Laura Lippman

Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it. — Laura Lippman

Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn't seem to like you that much. — Laura Lippman

But the central branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library was still a place of wonders to Tess, even if the book budget had been slashed and the hours cut. Her parents had made a lot of mistakes, a fact Tess compulsively shared on first dates, but she gave them credit for doing one thing right: Starting when she was eight, they gave her a library card and dropped her off at the downtown Pratt every Saturday while they shopped. Twenty-one years later, Tess still entered through the children's entrance on the side, pausing to toss a penny in the algae-coated fish pond, then climbing the stairs to the main hall. If she could be married here, she would. — Laura Lippman

She was not a dog person. She was not a cat person, fish person, or horse person. On bad days, she was barely a people person. She ate meat, wore leather, and secretly coveted her mother's old mink. — Laura Lippman

McCafferty's was a Mount Washington steak house, sort of the Palm Lite, with caricatures of Baltimore celebrities hanging — Laura Lippman

There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is. — Laura Lippman

The problem was that such simple, ordinary bliss seldom formed memories. It was too smooth and silken to adhere. It was the bad stuff, ragged and uneven, that caught, like all those plastic grocery bags stuck in the trees of Baltimore. — Laura Lippman

The competition for the future of crime fiction is fierce, as it should be, but don't take your eyes off Craig McDonald. He's wily, talented and-rarest of the rare-a true original. He writes melancholy poetry that actually has melancholy poets wandering around, but don't turn your backs on them, either. I am always eager to see what he's going to do next. — Laura Lippman

Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving. — Laura Lippman

Still, the food is good." Whenever Tess came to Attman's, she wondered why she wasn't there at least once a week. "Best deli in Baltimore, by my lights. — Laura Lippman

Her dilemma - the eternal human dilemma - is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future. — Laura Lippman

Literally. Unlike most people, even allegedly educated ones, he used — Laura Lippman

There was no protection, no quota system when it came to luck. It was like that moment in math when a child learns that the odds of heads or tails is always one-in-two, no matter how many times one has flipped the coin and gotten heads. Every flip, the odds are the same. Every day, you could be unlucky all over again. — Laura Lippman

I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes. — Laura Lippman

I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series. — Laura Lippman

In her experience, it was those first sixty seconds, from the moment she flashed her P.I. license to the end of her pitch, that she was most likely to earn someone's cooperation. Older people were the easiest, if only because they were so often bored out of their minds that they welcomed any distraction. Men were curt, but they usually found the time, as long as she did the little-me, big-eye, big-chest thing. Women were more skeptical, because women spent their lives listening to bullshit. — Laura Lippman

Esskay rested her head on Tess's knee, gazing into her eyes in the soulful way that meant "Pet me," unless there was food handy, in which case it translated to "Feed me. — Laura Lippman

When destiny wants to fuck with you, it can afford to be patient. Destiny has all the time in the world. — Laura Lippman

I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times article on the subject of modern attitudes toward our slave-holding past, the writer noted that we all want to be from "innocent origins." I _know_ I'm not. Then again, I suspect most of us are not. — Laura Lippman

and a Dr. Brown's celery soda. — Laura Lippman

Cynthia didn't mind Confederate flags. She'd like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way. — Laura Lippman

Satisfactory husband that he was, he was a man and not one inclined to wax poetic about a day of cupcakes and movies. — Laura Lippman

Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child. — Laura Lippman

No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did. — Laura Lippman

Baltimore. It's imperfect. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It's not all marble steps and waitresses calling you 'hon,' you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right. — Laura Lippman

Cain - and the password, "Indemnity." Given how rapidly management changed at the Beacon-Light, it was entirely plausible that this familiar — Laura Lippman

Hate how swiftly the world moves now, how glib everyone has become. We need to think more, not more quickly. — Laura Lippman

Listen, you know? Girls. They don't listen. They're in too much — Laura Lippman

I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people. — Laura Lippman

I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre. — Laura Lippman

She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy. — Laura Lippman

Coitus interruptus by SWAT team. At last a form of birth control that was one hundred percent reliable. — Laura Lippman

How magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity? — Laura Lippman

Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on. — Laura Lippman

Cynics fooled themselves into thinking they had sussed out the worst-case scenarios and were invariably surprised by how life trumped them. Dreamers were often disappointed - but seldom in themselves. — Laura Lippman

I hate the habit of calling women high-maintenance, as if they were cars or appliances. As if women, in general, require care in a way that men do not. — Laura Lippman

She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life. — Laura Lippman

She was furious, with the kind of fury peculiar to the nonpaying client. Those who can't afford private attorneys ... assumed legal aid was incompetent. Do-gooders were simply losers in disguise. — Laura Lippman

Would-be novelists need to bring equal parts arrogance and ignorance to the task before them. The arrogance is almost self-explanatory. Walk into any bookstore or library, calculate how many lifetimes the average person would need to read all the fiction contained therein. To think that one has anything to contribute, to any genre or tradition, takes genuine hubris. — Laura Lippman

Fenwick, sitting down to — Laura Lippman

It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn't show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs. — Laura Lippman

I begin each book with a challenge to myself. — Laura Lippman

I hate to think how many minutes of my life I've spent on goddamn hold. I want those minutes back. When death comes for me, I want back every minute I was on hold in traffic jams, and behind people with eleven items in the ten items or less line. — Laura Lippman

What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson? — Laura Lippman

Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being. — Laura Lippman

Lu Googles "Jonnie Forke" - nothing. Literally, nothing, which is bizarrely impressive. She plugs "Jonnie Forke" in Facebook, finds an entry for Juanita Forke. Graduated Centennial High School. No overlap with Drysdale there. Relationship status, single. She has only seventy-four friends, so she's one of those people who actually uses Facebook for friends, yet doesn't think to opt for the highest-security settings. To be fair, the site changes its privacy policy so often, some well-intentioned people don't realize their fences are down. Lu — Laura Lippman

My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy. — Laura Lippman

Almost every writer I know dreads the moment when someone tries to give you an idea. It's not that the ideas are bad, just that the relationship between writer and novel is so personal that it's a little like someone trying to play matchmaker for a happily married person. — Laura Lippman

Doing nothing," Inez said, "is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something. — Laura Lippman

Things have happened - so fast. Ten days ago, we didn't even know Rudy was sleeping rough again." "Isn't that a British term?" "It is." Mrs. Drysdale is allowed to speak to this at least. "But Rudy liked it. He said it was more like the way he lived. He wasn't homeless. Our door was always open to him. Always. — Laura Lippman

It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world. — Laura Lippman

Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother - at least, every one who's honest with herself - has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don't want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know. — Laura Lippman

She was a polite person, and politeness meant making others feel better even if it made you feel like shit. — Laura Lippman

Allowing one's self to be forgiven is just as hard as forgiving. Harder in some ways. Because to be forgiven, one first has to admit to being at fault. — Laura Lippman

They were, as a family, constantly on the verge of being dangerously, enviably cute. — Laura Lippman

One with a cubicle and a desk that snags your panty hose and endless memos about the right way to dispose of recyclables. And lots and lots of petty intrigue and small-minded politics, all intended to distract you from the fact that you're getting two percent raises from a company that's returning twenty percent to its stockholders. That's a real grown-up's job. — Laura Lippman

This was the second job she had lost in the last eight months, and for the same reasons. Not a people person. Not a self-starter. Showed no initiative. She wanted to argue that minimum-wage jobs such as this shouldn't require initiative. She knew how to live inside an hour, how to weather the slow passing of time. She could endure boredom better than anyone she knew. Wasn't that enough? Apparently not. — Laura Lippman

Going to college don't make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an over can call itself a biscuit. — Laura Lippman

I like to see writers reach bigger and bigger audiences, and stand-alones have allowed some of them to do just that. — Laura Lippman

He brought down Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Jay Cantor's Krazy Kat, then grabbed an omnibus volume of Dick. "And this is the book that inspired the film we saw tonight." Tess stifled a laugh, but not the surge of affection behind it. Where some might have seen an almost woeful ignorance — Laura Lippman

Being a mother was like being trapped in the first fifteen minutes of a horror film. Everything was fine, lovely. But there was this persistent sense of dread. — Laura Lippman

There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life. — Laura Lippman

Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for. — Laura Lippman

There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat. — Laura Lippman

I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws. — Laura Lippman

Feeding her raw oysters at Charleston, or sharing the gingerbread with lemon chiffon sauce at Bicycle. — Laura Lippman

Bring wine," she hissed into the phone. "And Matthew's pizza. Those lima beans with feta cheese from Mezze. Sopa-pillas from Golden West. Hurry! — Laura Lippman

Stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing. — Laura Lippman

It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart. — Laura Lippman

Everyone thinks everything's a waste of time when it's not the thing that leads to an answer. — Laura Lippman

I would prefer," Pat said, his voice a little stiff, as if he expected resistance, "that I be the cosigner on the loan, if you go through with this. I know I'm not a famous billionaire, but I think my credit's just as good."
No, you're wrong about that," Tess said, shaking her head.
What?"
As far as I'm concerned, it's better. I'd much rather do business with you."
They shook on it. It was a deal, after all, not a time for hugging.
Favors, Arnie Vasso had once said. Your father knows all about favors. He had meant it as an insult, a sly reference to the corners the Monaghans and Weinsteins cut here and there. Now Tess saw it for the simple truth it was: Her father understood favors. How to do them, how to accept them, how to walk away when the price was too steep. It was a lesson she wouldn't mind learning someday.
Maybe this was the place to start. — Laura Lippman

Where are you getting your material - Portnoy's Complaint?" "What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking — Laura Lippman

You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought,. It's still a play where everyone dies in the end. — Laura Lippman

No one at fifteen was ever in love, outside of Romeo and Juliet, and maybe not even them. Old Giff used to argue that the star-crossed lovers simply were buzzed on the fumes of forbidden lust. Give them thirty years of togetherness, Old Giff always said, and Juliet would be plunging the dagger into Romeo. — Laura Lippman

All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings. — Laura Lippman

Just because you worked hard on something didn't make it worth doing. — Laura Lippman

There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions. — Laura Lippman

She was only beginning to grasp the geometry lessons that had perplexed her in junior high, the revelation that the world was full of infinite planes that never intersect. — Laura Lippman

Sometimes you have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them. (7) — Laura Lippman

Founder Rouse wanted to challenge a lot of ingrained biases in our culture; taste was not among them. He gave people the ticky-tacky houses they wanted. The only real choices were brick or wood siding, a Baltimore or a D.C. prefix for your phone. — Laura Lippman

he began, over dinner at Cantler's, a much beloved but out-of-the-way restaurant near — Laura Lippman

Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience. — Laura Lippman

Everyone cared what others thought, even those who were defiantly different. They cared more than anyone. — Laura Lippman

It's very different to have this kid that I'm truly responsible for. — Laura Lippman

The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit--it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand. — Laura Lippman

In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event. — Laura Lippman

Tess's Uncle Donald winced when he entered the Kibbitz Room at Attman's Delicatessen. The pained expression — Laura Lippman

etiquette rule that dictated a woman should put on all the jewelry she intends to wear, then remove one piece before leaving the house. Maybe two pieces, in his case. — Laura Lippman

But you were a goody-goody, you said.' 'Even goody-goodies think about such things. In fact, I would say that's what defines us. We're always thinking about the things we don't dare do, figuring out where the lines are drawn, so we can go right up to the edge of things, then plead innocence on the ground of a technicality. — Laura Lippman

John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike doesn't know dick about what it's like to be a homicide cop in Baltimore. — Laura Lippman

The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been. — Laura Lippman

sound silly, but I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did." Tess replayed these words in — Laura Lippman

We become comfortable saying that there's nothing new, and then something like Malarky comes along, which is new and old and different and familiar, but ultimately itself, comfortable in its own skin, wise and smart and crazy-sexy or maybe sexy-crazy-well, you just have to read it to understand. It's a novel that sets its own course, sure and steady, even when it seems like it might be about to go over the edge of the world. — Laura Lippman