Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
Sue GraftonRead
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.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the dark reality that those close to us can be capable of extreme violence, including murder.
Sue Grafton's quote delves into the unsettling idea that the most trusted and loved individuals in our lives could harbor violent tendencies. It highlights the irony and discomfort of intimacy, suggesting that the people we share our lives with are often the ones who can pose the greatest danger, provoking a chilling sense of vulnerability during everyday moments like family dinners.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the nature of crime in society.
Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
My second husband and I were going through a bitter divorce, and I didn't have the money for a fancy-pants attorney. I didn't know how to fight, so I'd lie awake at night and think of ways to kill him. But I knew I'd get caught, so I decided to put it in a book and get paid for it! I always think it's odd that a whole career came out of that homicidal impulse.
There are days when none of us can bear it, but the good comes around again. Happiness is seasonal, like anything else. Wait it out. There are people who love you. People who can help.
So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.
A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent to anyone, especially a man, because the minute you were dependent, you could be abused.
I tried during the 1974 campaign to show my husband not as the aloof intellectual people think he is, but the warm, passionate man I know. But the day after the election - after I'd worked so hard - I was put back on the shelf. I was devastated.
It occurred to Dr. Lecter in the moment that with all his knowledge and intrusion, he could never entirely predict her, or own her at all. He could feed the caterpillar, he could whisper through the chrysalis; what hatched out followed its own nature and was beyond him. He wondered if she had the .45 on her leg beneath the gown. Clarice Starling smiled at him then, the cabochons caught the firelight and the monster was lost in self-congratulation at his own exquisite taste and cunning.
When any society says that I cannot marry a certain person, that society has cut off a segment of my freedom.
We must have infinite faith in each other.
I like people too much or not at all. I've got to go down deep, to fall into people, to really know them.
The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.