Nevada Barr Quotes & Sayings

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. — 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. — Nevada Barr

Because of our library system anyone in America can educate themselves in any field they desire. If they are confused, librarians (that without exception in my forty-seven years experience with them) actually want to help; they take the time to try and get whatever is needed. For free. For anybody. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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

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. — Nevada Barr

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 — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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 ... — Nevada Barr

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

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

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

Bad vibes, an underlying sickness or misery that oozed out around the edges of conversations and interactions. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

We are one another's angels. — Nevada Barr

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 — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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 — Nevada Barr

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

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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 — Nevada Barr

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

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

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. — Nevada Barr

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 — Nevada Barr

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

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. — Nevada Barr

It was a number of years of crashing and burning before I made the discovery that I was not God. Finally I realized that though I was not God, I was of God — Nevada Barr

Perhaps love was like the mumps. If a woman came down with it after forty, it could kill her — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

Dose it ever amaze and delight you that of all the places in the world - cold grassy nests under hedgerows, warm patches of sun on a carpet - the cat chooses to sit on your lap? — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

Nature was taking back what had once been hers. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

What we have done is unacceptable. — Nevada Barr

added because it was the polite thing to do. "I'm going home," Cricket insisted as if Anna had threatened to drag her bodily back into the — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr

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 — Nevada Barr

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

look at Caroline's hands. — Nevada Barr

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. — Nevada Barr