146 Quotes by Robert B. Parker

Since when do you and I talk about the world,” she said. “The world is what it is.”“Yeah, I know.”“Not only do you know, you’ve helped me to know.”“Good to be useful,” I said.“What has always made me respect you, even in thebad times, was your ability to look out at the worldand see what’s there. Not what you’d like to see, oreven what you need to see, but simply what’s there.

Say it turns out to be the gun, and it’s going to be major-league coincidence if it doesn’t, you’re going to want to know whose gun it is, and if I tell you that I’ll have to tell you how I know it’s his and if I tell you that I’ll have to tell you things I don’t want to tell you.” “But now that we know you’ve got it,” Lundquist said, “we can sort of insist.” “True,” I said. “And you know how hard we can insist when we feel like insisting.

You and Galileo,” I said. “Didn’t he throw his balls off the leaning tower?” Quirk Said.

You wanted me to insist. You wanted me to win the argument.” “Wanted is too simple,” Susan said. She had shifted her gaze from her martini to the ongoing afternoon outside her kitchen window. “I wanted and didn’t want. I needed both my autonomy and your protection. By acting the way I did, I managed to have both.

Everyone froze. In real time the whole sequence had probably taken ten seconds. In the slow motion of crisis time it had unreeled in ponderous elegance, and the crystalline immobility that followed was intensified by the lingering smell of gunfire, like an olfactory echo of the big bang.

Do you have a first name, Mr. Spenser'?” Jill said. She had a soft girlish voice with just a hint of huskiness at the edges. I told her my first name.

You walked a mile in the rain to drink hot water?” “To be with you,” she said. “You’re better than pie.” And I turned under the umbrella and embraced her with my free arm and pressed my mouth against hers and held her hard against me and smelled her perfume and closed my eyes and kissed her for a long time in the still rain, and even after

It was a bright day, but cold, and the whores had emerged, working the Combat Zone, looking cold and bizarre in their miniskirts, boots, and blond wigs. Being seductive at twenty degrees was heavy going, I thought. Being horny at twenty degrees wasn’t all that easy either.

The [living] room was as intimate as an operating room but not as welcoming.