Sue Grafton Quotes

Train yourself to listen to that small voice that tells us what's important and what's not.

If your mind isn't open, keep your mouth shut too.

You can’t save others from themselves because those who make a perpetual muddle of their lives don’t appreciate your interfering with the drama they’ve created. They want your poor-sweet-baby sympathy, but they don’t want to change.

Life was reduced to its four basic elements: air, food, drink, and a good friend.

Who knows what part we play in other people's dreams?

My job as the writer is to fool you. Your job as the reader is to see if you can catch me at it.

We all need to look into the dark side of our nature - that's where the energy is, the passion. People are afraid of that because it holds pieces of us we're busy denying.

God save us from the people who want to do what's best for us.

Ideas are easy. It's the execution of ideas that really separates the sheep from the goats.

Lucky is the spouse who dies first, who never has to know what survivors endure.

People who've had happy childhoods are wonderful, but they're bland... An unhappy childhood compels you to use your imagination to create a world in which you can be happy. Use your old grief. That's the gift you're given.

If you're unhappy, change something.

Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.

I write letters to my right brain all the time. They're just little notes. And right brain, who likes to get little notes from me, will often come through within a day or two.

Sometimes the hardest part of my job is the incessant reminder of the fact we're all trying so assiduously to ignore: we are here temporarily. Life is only ours on loan.

The struggle is what teaches you.

Pretending to be 'normal' is a lot harder than you think.

Grieving is like being ill. You think the entire world revolves around you and it doesn't.

When all else fails, cleaning house is the perfect antidote to most of life's ills.

I think you'd best make your peace with the past since you've come this far. I think you know by now that you won't go back again.

Sometimes I wonder what the difference is between being cautious and being dead.

If high heels were so wonderful, men would still be wearing them.

He might be a man without character, but she was a woman without courage. Of the two, which was worse?

I've never known anyone yet who doesn't suffer a certain restlessness when autumn rolls around... We're all eight years old again and anything is possible.

Pay minimum wage, you get minimum work. Nobody seems to get that.