65 Quotes by Chris Pavone

Malcolm gestures in the vague direction of ugly sad lonely crap, which as it happens is toward Times Square.

It didn’t need to be light to be day.

There’s an awful lot of beauty in Europe, but there’s also no shortage of ugly.

Because when people are transferring millions of dollars, they don’t simply hit the Send button on their computer. They’re also on the phone with a bank officer, confirming the transaction. The customer creates the transaction detail, then the bank officer executes the transfer. This is how banks prevent fraud.

She stared at this first bit of positive proof, the entrance to the rabbit hole from which she might never reemerge.

But all people have secrets. Part of being human is having secrets, and being curious about other people’s secrets. Dirty fetishes and debilitating fascinations and shameful defeats and ill-begotten triumphs, humiliating selfishness and repulsive inhumanity. The horrible things that people have thought and done, the lowest points in their lives.

Whatever her husband had done, it couldn’t be as bad as what she herself had done.

But Kate was wide awake, chased by the same demon that haunted her regularly, especially when she was trying to forget it.

Kate had always known that she herself was a strong woman. But it never occured to her that there were strong women everywhere, living mundane lives that didnt include carrying weapons amid desperate men on the fringes of third-world wars, but instead calmly taking injured children to hospitals, far from home. Far from their mothers, and fathers and siblings, from school chums and old collegues. In a place where they had no one to rely on except them-selves, for everything.