“Evil doesn't die. It never dies. It just takes on a new face, a new name. Just because we've been touched by it once, it doesn't mean we're immune to ever being hurt again. Lightning can strike twice.”
“Where we go depends on what we know, and what we know depends on where we go.”
“The most intimate feeling people can share is neither love nor hate, but pain.”
“She now knew her death was inevitable, and with that acceptance came liberation. The courage of the condemned.”
“What Rizzoli thought, staring at her own image, was that she hated Elizabeth Hurley for giving women false hope. The brutal truth was, there are some women who will never be beautiful, and Rizzoli was one of them.”
“We never know until the beast of opportunity is staring us in the face.”
“No matter how much you try to maintain order in your life, no matter how careful you are to guard against mistakes, against imperfections, there is always some smudge, some flaw, lurking out of sight. Waiting to surprise you.”
“She was the only woman in the homicide unit, and already there had been problems between her and another detective, charges of sexual harassment, countercharges of unrelenting bitchiness.”
“That is exactly what I learned. That evil can be so ordinary.”
“Had she always been so insulated from human contact, like a bloom encased in frost?”
“And like a drowning woman who chooses the black sea instead of rescue, she did not take it.”
“I’m a dinosaur, he thought, lumbering through a world where truthtellers
are despised.”
“There's nothing as boring as perfection”
“This unsub is a classic picquerist. Someone who uses a knife to achieve secondary or indirect sexual release. Picquerism is the act of stabbing or cutting, any repeated penetration of the skin with a sharp object. The knife is a phallic symbol--a substitution for the male sexual organ. Instead of performing normal sexual intercourse, our unsub achieves his release by subjecting his victim to pain and terror. It's the power that thrills him. Ultimate power, over life and death.”
“Gradually the beep of the EKG slowed. Against the steady rhythm of that heartbeat, the two women gazed at each other. If Catherine had recognized a part of herself in Nina’s eyes, so, too, did Nina seem to recognize herself in Catherine’s. The silent sisterhood of victims. There are more of us than anyone will ever know. ”
“No kiss, no embrace, could bring two people any closer than we are right now. The most intimate emotion two people can share is neither love nor desire but pain.”
“fierce-looking, a coal-eyed brunette with a gaze direct as lasers. She”
“Catgut is a type of surgical thread made from the intestines of cows or sheep.” “So why do they call it catgut?” asked Rizzoli. “It goes back to the Middle Ages, when gut strings were used on musical instruments. The musicians referred to their instruments as their kit, and the strings were called kitgut. The word eventually became catgut.”
“It is cold in my cell. Outside, the harsh winds of February are blowing and I am told it has once again begun to snow. I sit on my cot, a blanket draped over my shoulders, and remember how the delicious heat had enveloped us like a cloak on the day we walked the streets of Livadia. To the north of that Greek town, there are two springs which were known in ancient times as Lethe and Mnemosyne. Forgetfulness and Memory. We drank from both springs, you and I, and then we fell asleep in the dappled shade of an olive grove.”
“I have a meanness inside of me, real as an organ.”
“Of all the men who were photographed that day, the chief’s life had come closest to the American ideal, closest in observing the principles on which this nation had been founded. He was immeasurably greater than Chester Arthur, the hack politician from New York, incomparably finer than Robert Lincoln, a niggardly man of no stature who inherited from his father only his name, and a better warrior, considering his troops and ordnance, than Phil Sheridan. His only close competitor was Senator Vest, who shared with him a love of land and a joy in seeing it used constructively.”
“Plans are one thing and fate another. When they coincide, success results. Yet success mustn't be considered the absolute. It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate resposne to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.”
“Truisms, my young friend, are the useless children of hindsight.”
“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” —JESUS OF NAZARETH”
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