106 Quotes by Robert Crais

The sense of smell in all dogs is their primary doorway to the world around them.

She asked me why I always had something flip to say. I said that I didn't know, but having been blessed with the gift, I felt obliged to use it.

She said, “Oh, Studly.” I could see her smile. “The law is not about justice. You know that.

That’s the way adults often talk to children. You know they’re not going to listen, but you want to tell them anyway just so you know that you have.

If my vision was good enough, I’d be an astronaut.

That Sunday, the sun floated bright and hot over the Los Angeles basin, pushing people to the beaches and the parks and into backyard pools to escape the heat. The air buzzed with the nervous palsy it gets when the wind freight-trains in from the deserts, dry as bone, and cooking the hillsides into tar-filled kindling that can snap into flames hot enough to melt an auto body.

Sometimes I am so dry that people don’t know I’m kidding and think I’m being serious. I enjoy this because their reactions are often funny.

People want you to be ordinary. They don’t like it when people are different. They don’t like it when a man soars over their heads while they stand in the dirt. People hate you when you’re special; it reminds them of everything that they aren’t.

Because of the wind, the crows were pointing in one direction but traveling in another. I wondered if they knew it, and, knowing it, understood it, or if they were simply oblivious, carried along by a force that was felt but not seen. The same thing happens to people, but most of the time they don’t know it, or when they know it, they think it an action of their own devising. They are usually wrong.