Jeffery Deaver > Quotes

“when making deductions, never state your conclusions as if they are certainties. When you do that, your mind instinctively closes out other possibilities.”
― Jeffery Deaver, Garden of Beasts

“If you’re going to get by in life, you’re going to have to learn to give up the dead.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Bone Collector

“Playing in the mist doesn't build character at all, Booty; it just makes you fucking wet.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Blue Nowhere

“Charlie Overby,”
― Jeffery Deaver, XO

“Northern Virginia could never decide whether it was a suburb of New York or a part of the Confederacy.”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“the Nero Award, and he is a three-time recipient of the Ellery Queen Readers Award for Best Short Story of the Year and a winner of the British Thumping Good Read Award.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Burial Hour

“he said that the head of the whole shebang, Averell Whittaker, is retiring and selling the company. I’m wondering if maybe a buyer hired the Locksmith then leaked the story to drive down the value of the company. Might be worth looking into.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Midnight Lock

“They were the hopeful. Who were trading homes and family and a thousand years of ancestry for the hard certainty of risky, laborious years ahead of them. Who had the slimmest of chances to take root in a place where their families could prosper, where freedom and money and contentment were, the story went, as common as sunlight and rain.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Coffin Dancer / The Empty Chair / The Stone Monkey

“Someone once asked him why he didn’t just use a tape recorder or at least type answers into a computer or tablet. His response: Speaking or typing creates just a glancing relationship with the words. Only when you write by hand do you truly possess them.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Final Twist

“Already sweating though it was just nine in the morning, Amelia Sachs pushed through a stand of tall grass. She was walking the strip search—what the Crime Scene people called it—an S-shaped pattern. Nothing. She bent her head to the speaker/mike pinned to her navy-blue uniform blouse.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Bone Collector

“Speculation about the past is inefficient. And therefore irrelevant to achieving your goal. So”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“His best work bore the stamp of John O’Hara and John P. Marquand.”
― Jeffery Deaver, A Century of Great Suspense Stories

“The Winnebago motored past working and long-abandoned factories devoted to manufacturing vessels and the countless parts and accessories with which ships were outfitted. To Colter Shaw, never a sailor, it seemed like you could spend every minute of every day maintaining, repairing, polishing and organizing a boat without ever going out to sea.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Goodbye Man

“The smoke of death wafted everywhere around him, constantly. But it wasn’t that finality that troubled him. In death, you had no reckoning. Far worse would be a catastrophic injury to the spine, to the eyes, the ears. Crippling his body, darkening the world or muting it forever.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Goodbye Man

“toss a weighted paper bag out.”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Midnight Lock

“As I read it I was thinking of the phenomenon of endgame. Although the concept can apply to many games, it is most common in chess, which is where I study the subject exhaustively. As the middle game draws to a close and the endgame approaches, a fundamental change occurs in the players’ attitudes, and, I swear, a macabre eeriness descends over the board. The surviving pieces take on different roles and importance. For instance, pawns become vital; not only can they move to the opponent’s first line and become queens but they provide important defensive barriers that limit the other player’s moves. Similarly the king spends most of the game in hiding, protected by his minions. But in endgame, he often must go on the offensive himself. Each”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“One said, “Nobody paused in front of the house since we’ve been here.” I slipped my ID case away. “Any out-of-state tags?” “Didn’t notice any.” Different answer from “No.” One”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“Joanne’s federal government employment history had been hidden very efficiently, of course. DuBois hadn’t found anything specific about what the woman or her coworkers did. But you could deduce their mission from what my protégée did uncover: the group’s funding (lavish and murkily channeled through nonexistent government agencies) and jurisdiction—in the U.S. only (office leasing and travel authorizations). Its history was enlightening too. The organization was created two weeks after the first Trade Towers bombing in New York in the 1990s, and their budget and personnel were doubled after the African embassy bombings and tripled after the attack on the Cole. After”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“was mildly surprised to see) and in the smallest”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Steel Kiss

“Anthony Boucher (1911–1968) was one of the most remarkable figures ever produced by the mystery genre. And”
― Jeffery Deaver, A Century of Great Suspense Stories

“Now, I regarded my opponent carefully, as if we were sitting across from each other over a chessboard. Zagaev had a round head, a double chin that his beard obscured pretty well and bristly hair that couldn’t decide to be gray or less gray. His age, duBois had reported, was only forty-three. His head was large, his pallor anemic. He nervously gripped and ungripped his hands every few seconds. I knew this only because I heard the tinkle of cuffs behind his back. He wore a thick gold chain around his neck and an amulet on which was an unlikely icon. I was pretty sure it was Tsar Alexander II, who I knew from my studies was a moderate reformer—by absolute-ruler standards—in mid-nineteenth-century Russia. Still, it was curious that a Chechnyan would choose this particular image. Zagaev’s clothes were expensive, more than I could afford, more than I wanted to. His suit was cut from vibrant blue silk, the color of the sky in a child’s fantasy book. His snakeskin shoes glittered in the jarring overhead light. His sweat was repulsive; I could smell body odor and onions from across the table. I”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“Just”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Cold Moon

“on”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Cold Moon

“He Who Hesitates (1965), Blood Relatives (1975), Long Time No See (1977) and The Big Bad City (1999).”
― Jeffery Deaver, A Century of Great Suspense Stories

“didn’t seem to be the nickname sort. Beautiful people rarely were. ‘Let’s”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Bone Collector

“What he was really asking was this: Was he making the right decision in assigning me, and not someone else, to the job of guarding principals from Henry Loving? In short, could I be objective when the perp was the one who’d murdered my mentor and had apparently escaped from the trap I’d set for him several years before?”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“I always carried in my breast or hip pocket a video camera disguised as a pen. It was linked to software whose algorithms alerted me that the body language of a person approaching was consistent with that of an impending attack. I also used it to record crowds in public when I was transporting principals, to see if faces of passersby in one locale turn up in another. A”
― Jeffery Deaver, Edge

“Who do we become when we step through the monitor into the Blue Nowhere?
From The Blue Nowhere”
― Jeffrey Deaver

“A spy in what her mother called the land of Mackerel Snappers and Shanty Irish.”
― Jeffery Deaver, Mystery Writers of America Presents Ice Cold: Tales of Intrigue From the Cold War

“Rhyme”
― Jeffery Deaver, The Bone Collector