Quotes from The Silent Girl

Tess Gerritsen ·  315 pages

Rating: (27.1K votes)


“I'm sorry to say that too often, I haven't a clue why people do things like this. Why they drown their babies or strangle their wives or shoot their coworkers. I see the results of their actions, but I can't tell you what sets them off. I just know that it happens. And people are capable of doing terrible things.”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from The Silent Girl


“Bella,Jane'in gözlerinin içine baktı. "Adalet herkesin paylaştığı bir sorumluluktur.”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from The Silent Girl


“Without ties to our ancestors, we are lonely specks of dust, adrift and floating, attached to nothing and no one.”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from The Silent Girl


“The gate downstairs has a dead bolt,” said Frost. “There’s no way you could pick the lock.” “Then how could anyone …” She went dead silent. Turned toward the doorway. Footsteps were thumping up the stairs. In an instant her weapon was drawn and clutched in both hands. Pushing aside Mr. Kwan, she quickly slipped out of the bedroom. As she eased her way across the living room, she felt her heart banging, heard Frost’s footsteps creaking on her right. Smelled incense and mold and sweat, a dozen details assaulting her at once. But it was the stairwell door she focused on, a black portal to something that was now climbing toward them. Something that suddenly took on the shape of a man. “Freeze!” Frost commanded. “Boston PD!” “Whoa, Frost.” Johnny Tam gave a startled laugh. “It’s just me.” Behind her, Jane heard Mr. Kwan give a squawk of fear. “Who is he? Who is he?” “What the hell, Tam,” said Frost, huffing out a breath as he holstered his weapon. “I could have blown your head off.” “You did tell me to meet you here, didn’t you? I would’ve gotten here sooner, but I got stuck in traffic coming back from Springfield.” “You talk to the owner of that Honda?” “Yeah. Said it was stolen right out of his driveway. And that wasn’t his GPS in the car.” He swept his flashlight around the room. “So what’s going on in here?” “Mr. Kwan’s giving us a tour of the building.” “It’s been boarded up for years.”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from The Silent Girl


“Kusursuz suç, diye düşündü Jane. Ama bir görgü tanığı vardı. Mahsen merdiveninin altına saklanmış, sessiz bir kız.”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from The Silent Girl



“detective, in a blazer and oxford”
― Tess Gerritsen, quote from The Silent Girl


About the author

Tess Gerritsen
Born place: in The United States
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Popular quotes

“I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing.

Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure.

I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode.

I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same?

Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.”
― Jung Chang, quote from Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China


"I don't know; Killers are sort of romantic. Imagine your dying with his hands around his throat. He'd strangle the life out of you, and the last thing you would see would be his face."
― L.J. Smith, quote from The Awakening / The Struggle


“Between pants, I continued spewing how much I hated him. Around my lips, he kept telling me I didn't.”
― S.C. Stephens, quote from Thoughtless


“She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet.”
― Stieg Larsson, quote from The Millennium Trilogy


“The inspector ate only two of my tiny sandwiches: the first because he hadn't expected it to taste so awful; the second, I think, because he'd thought surely the first must have been a mistake.”
― Karen Marie Moning, quote from Faefever


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