Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.

There are certain families whose members should all live in different towns - different states, if possible - and write each other letters once a year.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

Hell lies at the bottom of the human heart.

The delicate sensitivity of a frightened rattlesnake.

I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.

The surprise with which a detective novel concludes should set up tragic vibrations which run backward through the entire structure.