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1 " Perspective gets lost in moral certainties. Which only means that no one was ever burned at the stake by a doubter. "
― Thomas H. Cook , The Quest for Anna Klein: An Otto Penzler Book
2 " She was a woman of extended silences, I noticed, and she said very little as we walked the streets of La Boca, looking at its brightly colored houses. It was as if she understood that quiet observation was the key to knowing a place, perhaps even the key to life. "
― Thomas H. Cook , The Crime of Julian Wells
3 " Books and I went back. My old man taught me to read at age three-and-a-half. I bloomed into a classic only child/child-of-divorce autodidact. "
― Thomas H. Cook , The Best American Crime Writing 2005
4 " I saw crime everywhere. Crime was not isolated incidents destined for ultimate solution and adjudication. Crime was the continual circumstance. It was all day, every day. The ramifications extended to the 12th of Never. This is a policeman's view of crime. I did not know it then. "
5 " I roamed L.A. by night. I got repeatedly rousted by LAPD. I sensed that a cop-street fool compact existed. I behaved accordingly. I denied all criminal intent. I acted respectfully. My height-to-weight ratio and unhygienic appearance caused some cops to taunt me. I sparred back. Street schtick often ensued. I mimicked jailhouse jigs like some WASP Richard Pryor. Rousts turned into streetside yukfests. They played like Jack Webb unhinged. I started to dig the LAPD. I started to grok cop humor. I couldn't quite peg it as performance art. I hadn't read Joseph Wambaugh yet. "
6 " At a certain point memory becomes a beach strewn with landmines, all life’s many losses buried in those sands. "
7 " He looked at me intently, from what seemed behind the veil of a grave experience. Then slowly and prophetically, he said the scariest thing I'd ever heard: "Because the answer to a heartfelt question, Jack, will always break your heart. "
― Thomas H. Cook , Master of the Delta
8 " The last best hope of life is that at some point during living it, all that you did wrong will suddenly teach you to do right. "
― Thomas H. Cook , The Last Talk with Lola Faye
9 " It is important to keep old things, he insisted, because it was through them alone that new things could be judged. "
10 " A traveler enters the world into which he travels, but a tourist brings his own world with him and never sees the one he's in. "
11 " When he died, I felt like a dark, devouring force had been stilled at last. I wore his death like wings. "
― Thomas H. Cook , The Cloud of Unknowing
12 " It was at that moment that I’d first begun to experience one of life’s deepest lessons: you are the most alive when you feel the most vulnerable, not when the arrow is still in the quiver but when it has been released by the string and is flying toward you. "
― Thomas H. Cook
13 " A man with no one to revere, Julian said, is a man alone.' At that moment, he seemed to consider such loneliness the worst of fates, a sentence he would not have imposed upon the vilest man on earth. And yet, at times, I thought now, he had seemed to impose that very loneliness upon himself. "
14 " Some truths hit harder than others. "
― Thomas H. Cook , Sandrine's Case
15 " Loretta’s eyes flashed. “Is that what gets you through the night, Philip?” she asked. “Choosing to believe something, whether it’s true or not?” “In one way or another, Loretta, isn’t that what gets everyone through the night?” I asked. "
16 " ...I decided that there was perhaps no ash quite so cold as the one left by an unrealized ambition... "
17 " It’s not that we grow old, I thought, but that we grow old in decline and discomfort, and these hardships are made worse by the awareness that nothing will improve. No coming days will dawn brighter than the last that dawned, and this sorrow is further deepened by a fear of death… "
18 " The world has plenty of noise, Julian, but not many voices. And because there are so few, each one matters. . . That's my argument. The simple fact that we need people who remind us of the darkness. "
19 " It all comes down to people in the end. All the global policies and grand schemes. They all come down to what we do to people, whether we help or harm them. "
20 " All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood All partial Evil, universal Good. —ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man "
― Thomas H. Cook , The Fate of Katherine Carr
