"I liked my house. I liked my stuff. I had to start over once. I don't want to have to do it again. But life says, ‘Tough bounce,' and what are my options? Take it on the chin and keep marching."

"Man enters into the ethical world through fear and not through love"

"don't. The response was automatic—and just as automatically unspoken. He didn't cope. He never had. He just shoveled it all into the big dark pit inside him and hoped to hell the pit didn't overflow."

"one thing she had learned in life, it was that you could escape circumstance, but you could never escape who you were. Your personal truth was a shadow: There was no denying it, no changing it, and no getting rid of"

"plenty of people in law enforcement and social work who came from that same set of circumstances, people who had come to that same fork in the road and turned one way instead of the other."

"It never failed to amaze her, the sudden sharpness of that pain as it stabbed through the cotton batting of time. A part of her wished fervently it would dull, and another part of her hoped that it never would. The endless cycle of guilt: the need to escape it and the equally desperate need to cling to it."

"So long ago, the brief attempt at marriage seemed more like a half-remembered bad dream than a memory. Bringing it up was like kicking a pile of ashes, stirring old flecks of emotional debris inside him-feelings of frustration and failure and regret that had long since gone cold."

"That's the hardest thing to cope with when a young person dies—especially when they've been murdered. The unfulfilled dreams, the unrealized potential. The people close to them—family, friends—thought they had so much time to make up for mistakes, plenty of time down the road to tell that person they loved them. Suddenly that time is gone."

"That's the thing about digging holes,” Quinn said. “There are no assurances you'll find what you want—or want what you find."

"Everyone was a victim of something."

"The only rule of survival in a situation like this: Shut your mouth and keep moving."

"Anybody can look like a genius if they have all the answers ahead of time"

"The endless cycle of guilt: the need to escape it and the equally desperate need to cling to it."