Sara Paretsky
Rule number something or other -- never tell anybody anything unless you're going to get something better in return.Collection: Numbers
If you're born lucky, you don't have to be good.Collection: Good Luck
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.Collection: Heart
But what I've learned is, when your adrenaline is flowing, you can do a lot. I'm not very physical, but once some punks were trying to break into my house and I chased them down.Collection: House
It's hard for me to believe that just my words on the page are enough. I ought to be out physically keeping abortion safe and legal, restoring the Fourth Amendment, getting clean water back into Kentucky since the Bush Administration has allowed strip miners to fill it all up with slag. The list is endless. Bring it down. Make it small. Make it one thing that you can do. It's very hard for me to remember that.Collection: Believe
No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationshipCollection: Relationship
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.'Collection: Sweet
I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11Collection: Girl
You have to be a ruthless editor of your own prose. Over the years, I've learned that the best way to incorporate research into the narrative is to turn it into action.Collection: Action
While we were walking around, we came to the Catholic church, and we saw that some people had set fire to carpets and banked them around the rectory, which was made out of wood. They knew every fire truck on the South Side was going to be in the park, that the rectory would just burn to the ground. Our one little act was putting out that fire.Collection: Fire
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.Collection: Littles
I have one vivid memory of one of the days that the marches were taking place. We were in a Catholic, predominantly Polish and Lithuanian neighborhood. Chicago is a place where people define themselves by their parish and by their ethnicity.Collection: Memories
It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustratingCollection: Writing
I'm lucky in having found the perfect partner to spend my life withCollection: Perfect
I have a friend who lives in the South Side of Chicago. I helped out at a church charity there where they try to give a bit of cohesion to a desperate area. Everyone was very welcomingCollection: Giving
I'm at the atheist end of the agnostic spectrum.Collection: Atheist
I was reading Raymond Chandler very much with the feminist eye. In six of his seven novels, it's the woman who presents herself in a sexual way, who is the main bad person. And then you start reading more fiction, whether crime fiction or straight fiction, it's just bad girls trying to make good boys do bad things, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. The woman that thou gavest me made me do it, Adam says to God.Collection: Girl
I realised I'd never climb Everest but thought I could still write a bookCollection: Book
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.Collection: Pain
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.Collection: Growing Up
Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing.Collection: Kind
I admire about Hillary: Every time I am going to walk away from her candidacy, I think, she has absorbed more hate than anyone I can think of over the past twenty years, and she hasn't cracked under it. That's a kind of iron fortitude that maybe we need in the President of the United States. People project on to Hillary because she is a woman. They either hate her for everything they hate about women or they long for her to be everything they want in a woman. It's an impossible burden.Collection: Hate
I guess I don't have a candidate who makes my heart go pitter-patter the way I wish it would. I'm thinking, here's an African American candidate - yes! And here's a woman candidate - yes! Why can't I get behind either one of them? Don't tell me I have latent sexism or racism that I need to confront. I don't believe that. I think we are so burned by the current situation that we want somebody that it isn't possible to have. We want someone who definitely looks like the messiah.Collection: Believe
Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novelCollection: Novel
People have less privacy and are crammed together in cities, but in the wide open spaces they secretly keep tabs on each other a lot moreCollection: Space
Sometimes life seems so painful it hurts even to move my arms.Collection: Hurt
I'm jealous of everyone discovering Lovesey and Diamond for the first time-you have a wonderful backlist to catch up on. Me, all I can do is wait for the next book.Collection: Book
I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of timeCollection: Girl
I live and die with the Chicago CubsCollection: Chicago
Organizer is kind of a grand term for what I was doing. I answered an ad that the Presbyterian Church of Chicago put up on college campuses. I was at the University of Kansas, and it's somewhat relevant to my life and work that I'm a Jew. But they weren't doing a religious litmus test. They wanted energetic, civil-rights-committed college students to come help them run some summer programs.Collection: Summer
This was a very progressive group of clergy who foresaw the race riots that were going to take place when Dr. King started helping the local civil rights community push for open housing. They were sort of hoping against hope that we could educate kids in a way that could counter some of the racist messages they were imbibing at home. I don't know whether we did any good, but it changed my life in every single way.Collection: Kings
I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives.Collection: Summer
These events are swirling around them. In the white community, people felt like they had no control over their neighborhoods, their destiny. In the black community, centuries of government and economic forces were pushing on them. I went in with a kind of arrogance, maybe, that came from living in a very intellectual family, and I left knowing that there was a lot about the way people lived that I didn't know about.Collection: Destiny
I'm very honoured that there is a loyal following and I hope it continuesCollection: Loyal
When I tell people I was in the St. Justin Martyr parish, if they are native Chicagoans they know exactly where I was and what that was like. The Sunday before this particular march, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Cody, had required all of his pastors to read a letter in support of open housing and economic justice in every parish in the city.Collection: Sunday
And the fury in my community was just staggering. The young priests in the parish were behind the message. The older priests weren't necessarily, but they all followed the orders of the cardinal and read the letter. Every Sunday, 2,000 people came to mass at that parish. The following Sunday, the attendance dropped to 200, and never recovered.Collection: Sunday
Don't tell me I have latent sexism or racism that I need to confront. I don't believe that. I think we are so burned by the current situation that we want somebody that it isn't possible to have. We want someone who definitely looks like the messiah.Collection: Believe