No, I made small talk with Bessie, your shotgun, until you removed her double barrels from my kisser.”Violet and a typical conversation with Harvey

The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand...

If all goes well, we will be back in time for a proper memorial service [for your father], Ben. I promise.”Ben looked up, and all the bitterness was gone from his eyes, replaced somehow by...

I know what you’re up to.””I doubt that.” Hayes leaned toward her, his hand looping around the back of McKenzie’s neck as he gently drew her to him. “Because if you could see what I...

Natalie was bored in her marriage. At first she could hardly admit it to herself. After all, they were a perfect match: similar backgrounds, same religion, similar professions (she was a school psychologist, he was...

Oh, I’m not afraid of death! What have I got to live for after all? I suppose you believe it’s very wrong to kill a person who has injured you-even if they’ve taken away everything...

So much for the bimbo alert; if she read books like that, then there was a light on upstairs, above the splendid front porch.

Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion…but he set in its place the positivist doctrine of revelation which says in effect, ‘Take it or leave it’: Virgin Birth, Trinity or anything...

The butterflies swirl again in Sera’s stomach. Perhaps they have brought along fireflies too, to light up her soul.

Logically, this kind of atheism did not prove that there was no God…. On the contrary, Southwell was typical in placing the onus probandi on those who affirmed the existence of God and Holyoake regarded...

The city was a machine of its own, continuously producing. We were constantly pumped out through its assembly line, in different forms or models. We came hardwired with different stories, dark secrets, vices, and defects....

Gay sex, one. Straight sex, zero

In the white marble hall of the hotel, I’m waltzing with Rajat. The music is a river and we’re dancing in it. It winds against our bodies, muscular as a serpent.

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a...

N-no doubt.” I smirked again.

…heaven wouldn’t be like this earth, this tormented earth ruled by evil forces that tossed humanity to and fro like a slow clown in a two-bit rodeo.

A crowd of men stood in front of them. Of all ages, with expressions of sex-wonder in their eyes, gazing curiously as men who cannot solve a mystery that populates graveyards and through the ages...

It takes a certain kind of man willing to work long, grueling hours in a career offering few rewards.

These were not the belongings of the past prisoner he had imagined. These were a lady’s things—hairpins and stockings and a glove. There were more clues waiting but William no longer felt certain he wanted...

There are some things you cannot explain to anyone, even whey they have been explained to you, over and over, almost since the day you were born.

It was the freedom to experiment that made this experiment called Freedom possible.

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad...

I mean that we are both in space and inside the tower at the same time.””Why is it so dark here?” Ni asked.”At the beginning, it is always dark.” Simone replied, “Then everything comes into...

I think one who thrives on death may be defeated by life.Elswyth, from A Precarious Journey Into Magic

Tell them I have the headache–no, the plague! I need something nice and contagious.

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say...

I’m Italian,” I said inanely.

Mrs. French’s cat is missing. The signs are posted all over town. “Have you seen Honey?” We’ve all seen the posters, but nobody has seen Honey the cat. Nobody. Until last Thursday morning, when Miss...

Here God is not approached as an object that we must love, but as a mystery present in the very act of love itself.

What I’ve always taken away from his words is the sense that we all have something that confines us, that seeks to define us, label us, belittling us in the process, shortchanging our potential. Can...

Children are the closest we have to wisdom, and they become adults the moment that final drop of everything mysterious is strained from them.

She had her own barometer for knowing when a man was getting too close: as soon as he felt comfortable enough to help himself to something in her refrigerator, he was history….Filching leftover was simply...

The best method for getting away with something outrageous is to do it right in front of people, and then tell them they’re not seeing what they think they’re seeing.

I wish I could claim that I said this being an author, but alas I did not.” –I try to leave out the parts that people skip. — Elmore Leonard

She sounds very beautiful and mysterious. I say this because you told me she is beautiful, and little else, leaving the rest to mystery, and thereby making her very mysterious.

That’s where they found the skeletons. Right where you’re standing.

Every man will tell you little boys should not play with dolls but ask any mother and they will tell you, every little boy has gone to sleep cuddled into one at one time in...

People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.

…Obviously, I have always wished I could remember what happened in that wood. The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression,...

There is no such thing as magic, supernatural, miracle; only something that’s still beyond logic of the observer.

It was quite elementary,’ returned the detective with a languid gesture of one hand.

You know, Watson, I don’t mind confessing to you that I have always had an idea that I would have made a highly efficient criminal. –Sherlock Holmes

You can make a text mean anything, especially if it’s old and full of ambiguities.

THERE WAS ALWAYS a boy in your life that common sense and the prayers of parents told you to stay away from: fast talker, fast car, and fast hands. He was the boy your father...

The intersection of pork and man was circumscribed with vagueness. Until now sausage was a mysterious world: the fenced-in landscapes of strange, exotic muds, the cloak-and-dagger butchers that veiled their conversations in Old French, the...

¡El dinero es ridículo! ¡El crédito es ridículo! ¡Convenga usted en que la vida tiene mucho de ridículo!

Do we really mean it when we say ‘in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, until death do us part or do we add a silent clause, ‘unless you shame me or...

She never imagined that at twenty years old she’d already be a widow in black. On the bright side, she was no longer married to Dario, but her future still looked grim.

And she has come to make you free.

(M)ysteries in fiction are seldom as insoluble as those in life, as most writers can’t resist the lure of omniscience.