The Bone Collector

Sometimes you can't be what you ought to be, you can't have what you ought to have.

We have years to converse with someone, to blurt and rant, to explain our desires and anger and regrets - and oh how we squander those moments.

I needed somebody without any preconceived ideas. But I also needed somebody with a mind of her own.” The contradictory qualities we seek in that elusive perfect lover. Strength and vulnerability, in equal measures.

But then someday the truth would come out. It always did. Repress what you will, someday the truth comes out.

This only is denied the Gods: the power to remake the past. —ARISTOTLE

Criminalistics doesn't exist in a vacuum. The more you know about your environment, the better you can apply- (This quote was never completed in the book because Rhyme stopped abruptly at the end of it. I really wish he had finished his thought.)

The human creature is so astonishing, but count on it before anything else to be just that-a creature. A laughing animal, a dangerous one, a clever one, a scared one, but always acting for a reason-a motive that will move the beast towards its desires.

He believed there was nothing essentially unAmerican about greed or lust—hey, those qualities were encouraged everywhere from Wall Street to Capitol Hill.

WHEN YOU MOVE THEY CAN’T GETCHA ‘A

If they were expected,” she shot back, “then they wouldn’t be breakthroughs, now would they?

didn’t seem to be the nickname sort. Beautiful people rarely were. ‘Let’s

You bet they did. Dellray was there. You should've seen him. He ordered every other case put on hold and said if metallurgy report wasn't in your hands ASAP there'd be one mean mother——you get the picture——reaming their——you get the rest of the picture.

Stanton clawed his way to the bedside table and managed to grab his knife. He jabbed it into Rhyme. Once, twice. But the only places he could reach were the criminalist's legs and arms. It's pain that incapacitates and pain was one thing to which Lincoln Rhyme was immune.