“Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.”
―
Laura Lippman,
What the Dead Know
“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
“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, By a Spider's Thread
“Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.” ― Laura Lippman, The Most Dangerous Thing
“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, Hardly Knew Her
“It's a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.” ― Laura Lippman, Sunburn
“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, In a Strange City
“...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, Hardly Knew Her
“There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.” ― Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
“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, Baltimore Blues
“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, In Big Trouble
“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, What the Dead Know
“All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.” ― Laura Lippman, After I'm Gone
“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, Wilde Lake
“Sometimes you have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them. (7)” ― Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three
“No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.” ― Laura Lippman, I'd Know You Anywhere
“Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.” ― Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her
“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, Baltimore Blues
“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'd Know You Anywhere
“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
“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, By a Spider's Thread
“Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.” ― Laura Lippman, The Most Dangerous Thing
“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, Hardly Knew Her
“It's a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all.” ― Laura Lippman, Sunburn
“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, In a Strange City
“...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, Hardly Knew Her
“There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.” ― Laura Lippman, What the Dead Know
“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, Baltimore Blues
“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, In Big Trouble
“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, What the Dead Know
“All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.” ― Laura Lippman, After I'm Gone
“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, Wilde Lake
“Sometimes you have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them. (7)” ― Laura Lippman, To the Power of Three
“No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.” ― Laura Lippman, I'd Know You Anywhere
“Bad taste never dies. It just keeps evolving.” ― Laura Lippman, Hardly Knew Her
“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, Baltimore Blues
“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'd Know You Anywhere
