Sara Paretsky Quotes

20 Sourced Quotes

Remember: The only real social sin is to care what other people think of you.

Sara Paretsky
Hard to remember who is more dangerous: the people who are attacking our liberties overseas, or those who are suppressing them at home.

Sara Paretsky
When I enter a library, when I enter the world of books, I feel the ghosts of the past on my shoulders urging me to speech. I hear Patrick Henry cry to the Burgsses, 'Is Life so dear, or Peace so sweet, to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?' I hear Sojourner Truth tell me that the hand that rocks the cradle can also rock the boat, and William Lloyd Garrison say, 'I am in earnest, I will not be silenced.'

Sara Paretsky
I cannot find words to express the depth of my loss or outrage about what's happening to this country. I don't know if I can find the words for it, but if this country ever recovers, it will not be in my lifetime. If I were elected President, the first thing I would do would be to set up a Department of Restoring the Bill of Rights. I would have 10,000 people working there.

Sara Paretsky
Nothing kinder than strangers. Nothing stranger than kindness.

Sara Paretsky
The hardest thing about adolescence is that everything seems too big. There's no way to get context or perspective.... Pain and joy without limits. No one can live like that forever, so experience finally comes to our rescue. We come to know what we can endure, and also that nothing endures.

Sara Paretsky
All food starting with p is comfort food, I thought: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, pizza, pastry.

Sara Paretsky
The rich are different than you and me: they have more money and they have more power.

Sara Paretsky
In front of the clinic, holding the bullhorn, was a thin hyperthyroid man.... His supporters included a number of college-age young men, all fervently committed to carrying their own pregnancies to term, and a variety of middle-aged women, whose faces seemed to say: My life was made miserable by maternity, and so should everyone else's be.

Sara Paretsky
She knew the intensity of adolescence, and knew no cure for it except growing up. And then one has age and experience, and mourns the loss of intensity. Maybe it's why musicians and mathmaticians are said to peak young-poetry needs the fire of an unbounded universe.

Sara Paretsky
The decimation of Lebanon was showing up in Chicago as a series of restaurants and little shops, just as the destruction of Vietnam had been visible here a decade earlier. If you never read the news but ate out a lot you should be able to tell who was getting beaten up around the world.

Sara Paretsky
Never underestimate a man's ability to underestimate a woman.

Sara Paretsky
When you feel really lousy, puppy therapy is indicated.

Sara Paretsky
Live disasters are wonderful attractions when you're safe on the other side of them.

Sara Paretsky
Every writer's difficult journey is a movement from silence to speech. We must be intensely private and interior in order to find a voice and a vision — and we must bring our work to an outside world where the market, or public outrage, or even government censorship can destroy our voice.

Sara Paretsky
Rule number something or other — never tell anybody anything unless you're going to get something better in return.

Sara Paretsky
Heart surgeons do not have the world's smallest egos: when you ask them to name the world's three leading practitioners, they never can remember the names of the other two.

Sara Paretsky
I believe in the dull lie — make your story boring enough and no one will question it.

Sara Paretsky
She's a damned passive woman who runs her guilt-filled bus over the nearest passerby.

Sara Paretsky
Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.

Sara Paretsky