Quotes from Martin Cruz Smith

Mystery books. I must read a hundred a year. . . I just wish some of them were harder to figure out.

Wolves eat dogs." That did seem to be the consensus of the village, Arkady thought. Roman shook his head as if he'd given the matter a lot of consideration. "Wolves hate dogs. Wolves hunt down dogs because they regard them as traitors. If you think about it, dogs are dogs only because of humans; otherwise they'd all be wolves, right? And where will we be when all the dogs are gone? It will be the end of civilization.

Kali is the goddess of destruction, the Clawed Hands, the Blood Drinker... And that's one side of her, as it is for any god. If you knew her for thousands of years you'd know she could be all colors. The sky is black at night, but if your eyes were good enough, they could see the different lights of a million stars. Death is part of her because death is part of life.

Arkady was an Investigator of Special Cases, and if a bear running loose in the heart of Moscow was not a special case, he didn't know what was.

Between the intention and the act, life was often a tale told to the deaf. •

Your such a cynic. Exactly, that's what you call a guy who tells you the truth.

The gaja might despise the Romany, but no Rom ever forgot his dead. For him, roaming over the earth were not only the half million Gypsies who drew breath but also the countless Gypsies who had gone before, restless spirits still wandering through cities and deserts, still real.

Well, the Romanies have been around for five thousand years, longer than any nation. And why? Because we know how to survive. The Aryans tried to kill us, the Persians, the Tatars, the Magyars, the Africans, the Germans, everybody. But we stay together, and we move on, and we keep one thing in mind, to survive, and that is our greatest secret.

She [Kali] does according to her wisdom in destroying what is useless or what has lived its destined time.

Everyone is too young when their mother dies.

To capture the human cost of fallen empire with all its horror and absurdity, Sheets offers the right combination: the political insight of a top reporter and the power of a novelist.

I looked you up, Arkady. You have a checkered career." "I'm flattered. I was unaware of having any career at all.

These enemies of society are to be driven out of New York regardless of their constitutional rights.' The

What killed expert swimmers practicing underwater laps in pools was not a strangling on water but the soft oblivion of oxygen deprivation. At the end they no more than gently stirred, even if in the last lit cell in their brain they were still stroking powerfully ahead.

By definition prostitutes did not exist, because prostitution has been eliminated by the Revolution. Charges could be brought against them for spreading venereal disease, performing depraved acts or leading a nonproductive life, but by law there were no whores.

Find the crime, Arkady thought: trying to kill Stalin or missing him.

Drunks sagged and leaned like broken pickets on a fence.