Quotes from Aaron Elkins

I can't claim that I came out of it the winner. But I felt a lot like a kid who has finally found the guts to stand up to the schoolyard bully and tell him to take his best shot: bruised and bloody and thinking maybe that it hadn't been such a hot idea, but - what do you know? - still standing.

The thing is, women try to look slim-hipped like men, and they can't. Not if they have any female hormones. The very thing that makes a woman so lovely is exactly what you have: a big, beautiful trochanteric subcutaneous adipose tissue deposit.

When I walk into a house and see good paintings on the wall, I can smell money. But when I see tatty old carpets on the floor under them, I smell real money.

Where had the Taras and Megans and Ians come from? Buried in his work, had he missed some clandestine migration of Celts from across the sea?

No one is a hero at 4:00 a.m.,

Would you like to have

No more than a utilitarian structure when constructed in 1913 as headquarters for Lambert's first excavation, the plain, one-story stucco building had been going downhill ever since. For

Gideon laughed and took his milkshake from the opened lid of the glove compartment.

To appreciate a certain amount of material comfort," Gideon continued, "does not mean you are not a real person." Phil

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a novel/memoir by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer that is every bit as charming as its title, and Island at War, a Masterpiece Theatre TV miniseries. In

Nate might be a poor dumb bastard, but at least he wasn't a dishonest, fraudulent dumb bastard, and that ought to count for something.

About what you'd expect, was Gideon's grumpy and uncharitable thought, if you crossed John Gielgud with W. C. Fields.

understand it." "Well, you've got him now," John said. "You'll

A good scientist," Gideon explained, "modifies his operational hypotheses to accord with fresh data.

Nope. It's an axiom of the trade: When a moving head hits a fixed object hard enough, you get a crack; when a moving object hits a fixed head you get a depressed fracture.

gray-clad knees that hadn't come within ten inches of the soil. "Shall we have a look at the remains?" he said. "Perhaps we'd better establish at once that we're not dealing with a polydactylous pig." "We're not," Gideon said. "I can see that from here.

Well, you know what they say: Maybe money doesn't bring happiness, but it sure enough quiets the nerves.

I'm not really sure how we've arrived at this ridiculous juncture, and I'd be a great deal happier if we weren't pointing these things at one another, wouldn't you?

Hyperbolic rodomantade of the most puerile type.

Well, she certainly had a point there. It wasn't easy remembering you were an august personage.

The man was to be pitied, a simplistic dinosaur incapable of comprehending the new dynamics of the educational suprasystem and the role of academics as change-agents.

Ah!" Callie said, seizing on this, "what we expect of him. Couldn't that be the problem right there? Have we tried to attune ourselves to his needs? Have we taken the trouble to understand where he's coming from?

The therapeutic-psychodrama group at Esalen had helped her get that unwholesome idea out of her mind,

I don't have to be right, I am right,