Top 100 Robert B. Parker Quotes
#1. You and Galileo," I said.
"Didn't he throw his balls off the leaning tower?" Quirk Said.
Robert B. Parker
#3. I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!
Robert B. Parker
#4. You ever f**k Susan here?" she said, her face almost touching mine.
"I'm impressed," I said. "The question is intrusive, annoying, coarse, and voyeuristic. That's quite a lot to get into a simple question.
Robert B. Parker
#5. Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.
Robert B. Parker
#6. Perhaps the one absolute essential to growing up well is being tough enough," Susan said. "Like us," I said.
Robert B. Parker
#7. The medieval courtly love tradition holds that love is impossible in marriage because it is coerced, I said.
Robert B. Parker
#8. I got thrown out of school several weeks in my senior year being caught in the girls' dorm. This was 1954, friends. The girls' dorm was off limits. Even to girls, I think.
Robert B. Parker
#9. We split a bottle of Norman cider. Not everybody sells Norman cider by the bottle.
"Has a European feel" Susan said.
"That sounds terrific" I said. "Can I have one?"
Susan grinned at me. "How did you ever get to be so big without growing up?" she said.
"Iron self-control" I said.
Robert B. Parker
#10. And it's the reason I wanted you to live with me." "Not because I am cuter than a bug's ear?" "That too," Susan said. "But mostly I wanted to pretend to be what I had never been.
Robert B. Parker
#11. But if I were a man," she said, "I imagine you wouldn't let me say it." "No," I said. "If I didn't need your help, I wouldn't let you say it.
Robert B. Parker
#12. What if you could be young again and were able to undo the things that were done that made you into the person you would later become. But then who would you be.
Robert B. Parker
#13. I took some time to evaluate them, and concluded that fashionable dress was heavily dependent on who was wearing it. I
Robert B. Parker
#14. Loss is the price we pay for progress," she said. "Only as we leave things behind do we move forward.
Robert B. Parker
#15. Afterlife is no less implausible than anything else,' I said. 'All explanations of existence are equally incredible.' 'So you might as well believe something that makes you feel good as not,
Robert B. Parker
#17. If there are no things which are important, then things are assigned importance arbitrarily and defended at great risk. Because the risk validates the importance.
Robert B. Parker
#18. There's something about being able to literally consume a work of art - then to divide all that pleasure of it - because it's a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it's an extraordinary experience.
Robert B. Parker
#19. She's a sicko, Hawk." "Ah ain't planning to screw her psyche, babe.
Robert B. Parker
#20. Then why don't you get married?" "I'm not sure. Mostly it's a question of how we'd affect each other, I suppose. Would
Robert B. Parker
#21. Jesus Christ," she said. "You are just like him, a master of the fucking oblique answer.
Robert B. Parker
#22. I haven't seen so many Anglo Saxons in one place since the Republican Convention," I said. "You've never been to the Republican Convention," Susan said.
Robert B. Parker
#23. Mary sat, quiet and attentive and blank. It wasn't like talking to a dumb seventh-grader, it was like talking to a pancake.
Robert B. Parker
#24. Sure, I have advice for people starting to write. Don't. I don't need the competition.
Robert B. Parker
#25. Dewar's and water," I said. "Yes. I don't care really, but everyone at work says if you don't order by name they give you bar whiskey.
Robert B. Parker
#26. Back down to the ghetto again," I said. "Good for you," Hawk said. "Give you a chance to be a minority." "I like you," I said. "I am a minority.
Robert B. Parker
#27. The young man void of understanding may be depended upon to fall into the ditch of debauchery without much pushing, and
Robert B. Parker
#28. Don't you think we're oversexed?" "You're the shrink," I said. "You tell me." "Yes," she said. "I believe we are." "What should we do about it?" I said. "Encourage the pathology," Susan said, and smiled her rebelangel smile at me.
Robert B. Parker
#29. I try to be honorable. I know that's embarrassing to hear. It's embarrassing to say. But I believe most of the nonsense that Thoreau was preaching. And I have spent a long time working on getting myself to where I could do it. Where I could live life largely on my own terms.
Robert B. Parker
#31. Quirk was still staring out the window. "I'm trying to keep hold of this thing," he said. "The guy isn't going to stop and
Robert B. Parker
#32. She radiated a kind of excitement, the possibility of infinite promise. It wasn't just me. Most people seemed to feel that spending time with Susan would be an adventure.
Robert B. Parker
#33. Professionally," Susan said, "I'm not at all sure that love, as such, is not simply a complex of human impulses: need, identification, possessiveness, fear of loneliness, impulse to replicate the family from which you sprang, sexual desire, anger, the desire to punish, the desire to be punished.
Robert B. Parker
#34. Of course not," Samuelson said. "Del Rio's got a place in Bel
Robert B. Parker
#35. Susan of course would rather face gunfire than walk in the rain and ruin her hair. But
Robert B. Parker
#36. Susan came into the living room with her cowboy boots on and no other clothes. "Howdy," I said.
Robert B. Parker
#37. Has anyone ever told you," I said, "that you coalesce reality?"
"No. They only say that I'm good in the sack."
"They are accurate but limited," I said. "And if you give me their names I'll kill them.
Robert B. Parker
#39. I was on the Oprah Winfrey Show once. It was a really slow news day for Oprah, and there were several of us on 'cause none of us was sufficiently interesting by his or herself.
Robert B. Parker
#40. Asking your husband to go one-on-one with Joe Broz is like putting a guppy in the piranha pool. If we don't find him before Broz does, he'll be eaten alive.
Robert B. Parker
#41. They are more inclined to think you're innocent if you sound like Barbara Walters," Rita said.
"You think Barbara would be a good date?"
"Oh, oink," Rita said.
Robert B. Parker
#42. One must have a mind of winter, I thought, to behold the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
- from The Snow Man, by Wallace Stevens
Robert B. Parker
#44. Are you objectifying that young woman?" I said. "Absolutely not," Hawk said. "I thinking about her with her clothes off.
Robert B. Parker
#45. I can't put the profession ahead of the people it's supposed to serve," Susan said. "It would be like teachers who care more about education than students.
Robert B. Parker
#46. One of the things that made Susan so interesting was the fact that she looked like a Jewish princess and worked like a Bulgarian peasant.
Robert B. Parker
#47. I finished my New Amsterdam Black & Tan. I wanted another one, but I was used to that. I always wanted another one.
Robert B. Parker
#48. and gestured. A number of students were taking notes, some
Robert B. Parker
#49. Got nothing to do with us," I said. "I'm working on a case. You're my trusty sidekick." "Long as I don't have to call you Kemo Sabe." "Ever wonder what that meant?" I said. "I always thought it meant Paleface Motherfucker," Hawk said. "That's probably it," I said.
Robert B. Parker
#50. Colombians have been dealing with cocaine since your ancestors were running around Ireland with their bodies painted blue," Kingsley
Robert B. Parker
#51. To kill a man you need three things: the gun and the balls?" "We can get the gun okay,
Robert B. Parker
#52. Susan laughed. I always loved the sound of her laughter. And to have caused it was worth the west side of heaven.
Robert B. Parker
#53. There was nearly an inch of snow accumulated and Washington was rapidly sinking into hysteria.
Robert B. Parker
#54. There was no way to tell, looking at me, that I only had $387 in the bank. Three-piece
Robert B. Parker
#55. I liked the myth elements of Christmas. The way in which its origins reach back far beyond Jesus, to the rituals of people unknown to us. The celebration of the winter solstice. The coming of light in the darkest time.
Robert B. Parker
#56. The sedan went too and I stood alone in the woods and watched my ear burn.
Robert B. Parker
#57. Well, you give me too much credit for foresight and planning. I haven't got a clue what the hell I'm doing.
Robert B. Parker
#58. Called Evan Malone at the number Epstein had given me and got his wife, and made an appointment to come up to his place on Bow Lake to talk with him. On the drive up Route 93, I called Epstein on the cell phone.
Robert B. Parker
#59. Thing about getting a place with a great view," Hawk said, "is, after you moved in and looked at the great view for a few days, you get used to it and it ain't a great view anymore. It just what you look at out your window.
Robert B. Parker
#60. She rearranged her legs again. If she kept doing that, it was possible that I might begin to bugle like a stallion. Which would not be dignified.
Robert B. Parker
#61. Just like human life. You want something so bad you make it hard to get.
Robert B. Parker
#62. For David Parker and Daniel Parker, with the respect and admiration of their father, who grew up with them.
Robert B. Parker
#63. What we have here," I said, "is a roomful of culprits, with varying levels of culpritude.
Robert B. Parker
#64. It's tempting to say the Ph.D. didn't have an effect, but it's not so. I think whatever resonance I may be able to achieve is in part simply from the amount of reading and learning that I acquired along the way.
Robert B. Parker
#65. Can you analyze our relationship in the light of Silvermanian pragmatism?" I said.
"I love you because I find it compelling to be loved so entirely. You love me
because as long as you do you can believe in romantic love.
Robert B. Parker
#66. Punctuality was not Susan's strength. She always intended to be on time, but she seemed to have some kind of chronometric dyslexia, which thwarted her intent, nearly always.
Robert B. Parker
#67. You know that you can't predict and you can't expect that you should have predicted. You do the best you can, as decently as you can, and you accept the consequences.
Robert B. Parker
#68. But a lot of people got married so they could fuck six times a week. Then in a while they only felt like fucking once a week and had to talk to each other in between. Created a lot of drunks.
Robert B. Parker
#69. Teaching is too strong a word for whatever it was I did at Northeastern University.
Robert B. Parker
#70. When in doubt do something; and hope that if you keep doing it you'll come to understand what it is.
Robert B. Parker
#71. Finally it was probably less the poverty that bred crime than the sour stench of racism that hung over anyplace where people are separated out by kind.
Robert B. Parker
#72. And Quirk's a captain now," he said.
"Captain Quirk?"
The motorcycle cop grinned.
"Captain Quirk," he said.
Robert B. Parker
#73. You guys look like you shipped back here in a crate," Quirk said.
"Clothes are fresh from the dryer," I said. "Just need a little ironing."
"So does your life," Belson said.
Robert B. Parker
#74. It's just that myth about your equipment," I said. "Ain't no myth, man.
Robert B. Parker
#75. It was that juxtaposition of how it used to be with how it had turned out that made L.A. so interesting and so sad a place, I thought.
Robert B. Parker
#76. I read someplace that wanting to know everything about a person is wanting to possess them." "I believe that is probably true," Susan said.
Robert B. Parker
#77. 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.
Robert B. Parker
#78. She found me intolerable. But she got to know me, and I wore her down.
Robert B. Parker
#79. There were Palladian windows and a number of roof peaks and an assortment of architectural conceits, all overlooking a vast lawn devoid of ornamentation.
Robert B. Parker
#80. we love who we love whether we should or not, even though there are more suitable people to love.
Robert B. Parker
#81. How can a man with your heritage not be able to tap-dance." I heard Hawk's gliding chuckle. "My ancestors busy eating missionaries, boy.
Robert B. Parker
#82. Everything was elegant and cool, including Frederics, who was slicker than the path to hell.
Robert B. Parker
#83. They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'
Robert B. Parker
#84. The urban renewers had struck again. They'd evicted me, a fortune-teller, and a bookie from the corner of Mass. Ave. and Boylston, moved in with sandblasters and bleached oak and plant hangers, and last I looked appeared to be turning the place into a Marin County whorehouse.
Robert B. Parker
#86. from Arlington Street and onto the bridge. He had his hands in his coat pockets. "You Spenser?" he said. "Yes.
Robert B. Parker
#87. My older son who is, I think, here tonight, is forty-one years old. Which is odd because so am I.
Robert B. Parker
#88. It was 10:45. Across the continent Susan would be putting on her makeup now, and spraying some perfume on herself and making sure her hair was perfect. I looked at my reflection in the window. My hair wasn't perfect. Neither was I.
Robert B. Parker
#89. Freedom of the press is a flaming sword.
Use it wisely, hold it high, guard it well.
Robert B. Parker
#90. Belson came into the apartment with some crime-scene people and two homicide detectives.
"This guy," Charlie said, and looked at his notebook, "Spenser. He was impersonating a police officer."
Belson glanced at him. "We all thought that," Belson said, "when he was a cop.
Robert B. Parker
#92. Anger doesn't have to be expressed. It is enough to know that you're angry, and know why, and not lie to yourself about it.
Robert B. Parker
#93. Words can," Susan said. "And tone of voice. You're just so goddamned autonomous that you won't explain yourself to anybody.
Robert B. Parker
#94. One of Spenser's rules of detection is: Never poke around on an empty stomach. So I unpacked, got my gun, and went down for a club sandwich and
Robert B. Parker
#95. I'm entirely fascinated with you," I said. "And what you are is a result of what you were, including the other men.
Robert B. Parker
#97. Tony's patois kept getting broader as we talked. Like Hawk, he seemed able to turn it on and off. "Sho 'nuff," he said.
Robert B. Parker
#98. When we settled in to eat, Susan said, "So, tell me about it." "You shrinks are always so cocksure," I said. "Nice word choice," Susan said. "In the current context.
Robert B. Parker
#100. The ways of the Lord," I said, "are often dark, but never pleasant."
"Adler?"
"Theodor Reik, I think.
Robert B. Parker
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