Top 82 Laura Lippman Quotes
#1. There's always time to read. Don't trust a writer who doesn't read. It's like eating food prepared by a cook who doesn't eat.
Laura Lippman
#2. McCafferty's was a Mount Washington steak house, sort of the Palm Lite, with caricatures of Baltimore celebrities hanging
Laura Lippman
#3. sound silly, but I figured out that being happy made me happier than being unhappy ever did." Tess replayed these words in
Laura Lippman
#4. I think Baltimore suffers from nostalgia and it keeps us from being honest in talking about what really happened here. A place doesn't have to be perfect to be beloved, and I love this city and I love it better for seeing its flaws.
Laura Lippman
#5. Sometimes you have to destroy things, even people, in order to save them. (7)
Laura Lippman
#6. Listen, you know? Girls. They don't listen. They're in too much
Laura Lippman
#7. Bring wine," she hissed into the phone. "And Matthew's pizza. Those lima beans with feta cheese from Mezze. Sopa-pillas from Golden West. Hurry!
Laura Lippman
#8. I hate to think how many minutes of my life I've spent on goddamn hold. I want those minutes back. When death comes for me, I want back every minute I was on hold in traffic jams, and behind people with eleven items in the ten items or less line.
Laura Lippman
#9. Besides, what is the whole truth and nothing but the truth? The truth is not a finite commodity that can be contained within identifiable borders. The truth is messy, riotous, overrunning everything. You can never know the whole truth of anything. And if you could, you would wish you didn't.
Laura Lippman
#10. Almost every writer I know dreads the moment when someone tries to give you an idea. It's not that the ideas are bad, just that the relationship between writer and novel is so personal that it's a little like someone trying to play matchmaker for a happily married person.
Laura Lippman
#11. Children can be happy when their parents are miserable. But a parent is never happier than her unhappiest child.
Laura Lippman
#12. Reading was not a fallback position for her but an ideal state of being.
Laura Lippman
#13. They were, as a family, constantly on the verge of being dangerously, enviably cute.
Laura Lippman
#14. It was as if his fingers knew things, but they couldn't show him unless they were moving, touching. He had to think it was similar for carpenters and writers, and he knew it was the same for chefs.
Laura Lippman
#15. Cynthia didn't mind Confederate flags. She'd like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way.
Laura Lippman
#16. My family is really, really Southern - I had two uncle Bubbas, and grandparents that we called Big Mama and Big Daddy.
Laura Lippman
#17. Founder Rouse wanted to challenge a lot of ingrained biases in our culture; taste was not among them. He gave people the ticky-tacky houses they wanted. The only real choices were brick or wood siding, a Baltimore or a D.C. prefix for your phone.
Laura Lippman
#18. She was furious, with the kind of fury peculiar to the nonpaying client. Those who can't afford private attorneys ... assumed legal aid was incompetent. Do-gooders were simply losers in disguise.
Laura Lippman
#19. he began, over dinner at Cantler's, a much beloved but out-of-the-way restaurant near
Laura Lippman
#20. Whatever you want, at any moment, someone else is getting it. Whatever you have, someone else is longing for.
Laura Lippman
#21. Cynics fooled themselves into thinking they had sussed out the worst-case scenarios and were invariably surprised by how life trumped them. Dreamers were often disappointed - but seldom in themselves.
Laura Lippman
#22. Her dilemma - the eternal human dilemma - is that she wants a chance to revisit her choices with full knowledge of the future.
Laura Lippman
#23. The present is swollen with self-regard for itself, but soon enough the present becomes the past. This present, this day, this very moment we inhabit--it all will be held accountable for the things it didn't know, didn't understand.
Laura Lippman
#25. Esskay rested her head on Tess's knee, gazing into her eyes in the soulful way that meant "Pet me," unless there was food handy, in which case it translated to "Feed me.
Laura Lippman
#26. I like to see writers reach bigger and bigger audiences, and stand-alones have allowed some of them to do just that.
Laura Lippman
#27. Literally. Unlike most people, even allegedly educated ones, he used
Laura Lippman
#28. Anyone can love a perfect place. Loving Baltimore takes some resilience.
Laura Lippman
#29. John Updike, in that book you gave me, he said the dead make space. Do you know what I think? Updike doesn't know dick about what it's like to be a homicide cop in Baltimore.
Laura Lippman
#30. All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings.
Laura Lippman
#32. There was nothing more dangerous than people convinced of their own good intentions.
Laura Lippman
#33. Stinginess seemed instinctive to him. Darwinian even. He hadn't gotten to his current size by sharing.
Laura Lippman
#34. Everyone thinks everything's a waste of time when it's not the thing that leads to an answer.
Laura Lippman
#35. I'm for anything that lets writers stretch, in or out of their series.
Laura Lippman
#36. Going to college don't make you from somewhere, any more than a cat born in an over can call itself a biscuit.
Laura Lippman
#37. It's very different to have this kid that I'm truly responsible for.
Laura Lippman
#38. In fact, I think every book I've written has been inspired by a real event.
Laura Lippman
#39. Satisfactory husband that he was, he was a man and not one inclined to wax poetic about a day of cupcakes and movies.
Laura Lippman
#40. She was a polite person, and politeness meant making others feel better even if it made you feel like shit.
Laura Lippman
#41. How magnanimous was a gesture if one were constantly aware of its magnanimity?
Laura Lippman
#42. She was only beginning to grasp the geometry lessons that had perplexed her in junior high, the revelation that the world was full of infinite planes that never intersect.
Laura Lippman
#43. Doing nothing," Inez said, "is a choice in its own way. When you do nothing, you still do something.
Laura Lippman
#44. No one in the world loved you quite the way a younger sibling did.
Laura Lippman
#45. Because whenever a woman kills her child, every other mother - at least, every one who's honest with herself - has a flash of sympathy. Not empathy. They don't want to have done it, cannot imagine doing it. But they know.
Laura Lippman
#46. I've gotten to do a lot of stuff, traveled, worked hard at my career.
Laura Lippman
#47. I think I'm part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we'd chosen this very conservative genre.
Laura Lippman
#48. There's a serendipity to real life that the Internet can't duplicate. Do you use the library? For anything? Well, sometimes you end up picking up the book next to the one you were looking for, and it's that book that changes your life.
Laura Lippman
#49. Still, the food is good." Whenever Tess came to Attman's, she wondered why she wasn't there at least once a week. "Best deli in Baltimore, by my lights.
Laura Lippman
#50. Feeding her raw oysters at Charleston, or sharing the gingerbread with lemon chiffon sauce at Bicycle.
Laura Lippman
#51. Allowing one's self to be forgiven is just as hard as forgiving. Harder in some ways. Because to be forgiven, one first has to admit to being at fault.
Laura Lippman
#52. Tess's Uncle Donald winced when he entered the Kibbitz Room at Attman's Delicatessen. The pained expression
Laura Lippman
#53. It's smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart.
Laura Lippman
#54. I adore the work of Stephen Sondheim. I like musicales in general. They make surprisingly great running tapes.
Laura Lippman
#55. You can rewrite life all you want, Sandy thought,. It's still a play where everyone dies in the end.
Laura Lippman
#56. I'm at the age most people are sending their kids off to college.
Laura Lippman
#57. etiquette rule that dictated a woman should put on all the jewelry she intends to wear, then remove one piece before leaving the house. Maybe two pieces, in his case.
Laura Lippman
#58. She was not a dog person. She was not a cat person, fish person, or horse person. On bad days, she was barely a people person. She ate meat, wore leather, and secretly coveted her mother's old mink.
Laura Lippman
#60. Everyone cared what others thought, even those who were defiantly different. They cared more than anyone.
Laura Lippman
#61. She liked what she saw, although she knew being a not-beautiful woman was supposed to be a tragedy.
Laura Lippman
#62. When destiny wants to fuck with you, it can afford to be patient. Destiny has all the time in the world.
Laura Lippman
#63. Heloise long ago reconciled herself to the idea that all is fair in love and war, which is just another way of saying that nothing in life is ever fair, because life is love and war.
Laura Lippman
#64. The past was worth remembering and knowing in its own right. It was not behind us, never truly behind us, but under us, holding us up, a foundation for all that was to come and everything that had ever been.
Laura Lippman
#65. There are, of course, an infinite number of places where one is not, yet only one place where one actually is.
Laura Lippman
#66. The problem was that such simple, ordinary bliss seldom formed memories. It was too smooth and silken to adhere. It was the bad stuff, ragged and uneven, that caught, like all those plastic grocery bags stuck in the trees of Baltimore.
Laura Lippman
#67. Reporting is pretty vital to me. It keeps me connected to the world. A 40-hour-per-week day job may be less feasible as time goes on.
Laura Lippman
#68. Coitus interruptus by SWAT team. At last a form of birth control that was one hundred percent reliable.
Laura Lippman
#69. Hate how swiftly the world moves now, how glib everyone has become. We need to think more, not more quickly.
Laura Lippman
#70. Where are you getting your material - Portnoy's Complaint?" "What does an Irish lass named Monaghan know from Portnoy and afikomens? I imagine you reading James Joyce and drinking
Laura Lippman
#71. Being a mother was like being trapped in the first fifteen minutes of a horror film. Everything was fine, lovely. But there was this persistent sense of dread.
Laura Lippman
#72. I'm a morning person, which is a hideous thing to be. No one likes morning people, not even other morning people.
Laura Lippman
#73. It must be nice to be so strong and to think it's because you're so good, that you live right and eat right, so you deserve your health and happiness. But there is such a thing as luck, and there's more bad luck than good in this world.
Laura Lippman
#74. She might not be as strong as everyone she met, or as fast, or even as smart. But she could bullshit with the best of them. Combine that with a license to carry, and a girl could more than get by in this life.
Laura Lippman
#75. Ten years. Ten years. Rachel missed her father every day. Not consciously, but his absence was a part of her, like a vine that wraps around a structure, sustains it even as it weakens it.
Laura Lippman
#77. Just because you worked hard on something didn't make it worth doing.
Laura Lippman
#78. What was the point of giving children freedom to experiment and fail, if one then turned it all into a tiresome object lesson?
Laura Lippman
#79. I hate the habit of calling women high-maintenance, as if they were cars or appliances. As if women, in general, require care in a way that men do not.
Laura Lippman
#80. Now Lu wonders if her father worried that moving up through the political ranks would cost him that adjective, beloved. Certainly, almost no politician is described that way anymore. Even the people who vote for you didn't seem to like you that much.
Laura Lippman
#81. Cain - and the password, "Indemnity." Given how rapidly management changed at the Beacon-Light, it was entirely plausible that this familiar
Laura Lippman
#82. As for music, my tastes are eclectic. Elvis Costello is my all-time favorite. I listen to a lot of jazz, primarily the great female vocalists, and I am very fond of the late cabaret singer Nancy Lamott.
Laura Lippman
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