Top 160 Sue Grafton Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “I spent the first twenty years of my writing career preparing for the mystery genre, which is my favorite literary form.”

— Sue Grafton

102. “It’s hard to keep passing myself off as a grown-up when a piece of me is still six years old and utterly at the mercy of authority.”

— Sue Grafton

103. “Nothing wrong with being single when you can do as you please without objection or complaint. The presence of the fur ball was icing on the cake.”

— Sue Grafton

104. “I can’t stand a man who fawns, you know what I mean? I can’t stand a man sucking up to me, but he was the kind who took you right on the floor and he didn’t even look at you afterwards when he zipped up his pants.”

— Sue Grafton

105. “You know what they say about living well as the best revenge. I did well because it was the one defense I had. Escape has been the motivating force in my life. Getting away from him, getting away from her, putting that household behind me. The funny this is, I haven’t moved an inch, and the harder I run, the faster I keep slipping back to them... There are laws for everything except the harm families do.”

— Sue Grafton

106. “I have friends who adore high heels, but I can’t see the point. I figure if high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them.”

— Sue Grafton

107. “The dead are mute, but the living still have voice with which to protest their innocence. Often their objections are noisy and pious, impossible to refute since the person who could condemn them has been silenced forever.”

— Sue Grafton

108. “My notion of an elegant table is you don’t leave the knife sticking out of the mayonnaise jar.”

— Sue Grafton

109. “It’s a dangerous assumption and I know I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but it’s always easier to pin suspicion on someone you dislike.”

— Sue Grafton

110. “Death is insulting, and I resented its sudden appearance, like an unannounced visit from a boorish relative.”

— Sue Grafton

111. “Grief is as contagious as a yawn.”

— Sue Grafton

112. “The character of Rosie is based on a woman who used to live in the same apartment building I lived in many years ago. She’s taken on a life of her own, of course.”

— Sue Grafton

113. “I think you’d best make your peace with the past since you’ve come this far. I think you know by now that you won’t go back again.”

— Sue Grafton

114. “My primary lesson, however, was that I’m a solo writer, happiest when I’m making all the executive decisions. I’ve always been willing to rise or fall on my own merits.”

— Sue Grafton

115. “As long as you have sufficient toilet paper, how far wrong can life go?”

— Sue Grafton

116. “What could smell better than supper being cooked by someone else?”

— Sue Grafton

117. “So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what’s evident forever affected by the gravity of what’s concealed.”

— Sue Grafton

118. “You can’t go back to something once it’s dead.”

— Sue Grafton

119. “When it comes to work, it isn’t so much what we do or how much we’re paid; it’s the satisfaction we take in doing it.”

— Sue Grafton

120. “So far, I felt like I had a lapful of confetti and the notion of piecing it all together to make a picture seemed very remote indeed.”

— Sue Grafton

121. “I’m an organism of the earth, a Taurus. I was never born of air, of water, or of fire. I’m a creature of gravity and I could feel the ground whisper. The same thing happens to me in old hotels when I’m staying on the twenty-second floor. I open a window and want to fling myself out.”

— Sue Grafton

122. “As it is, we could not call mine a beautiful puss, but it does the job well enough, distinguishing the front of my head from the back.”

— Sue Grafton

123. “Emotion doesn’t travel in a straight line. Like water, our feelings trickle down through cracks and crevices, seeking out the little pockets of neediness and neglect, the hairline fractures in our character usually hidden from public view. Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.”

— Sue Grafton

124. “I’ve given this a great deal of thought and what I’ve realized is that revenge doesn’t have to be an eye for an eye. Retaliation can take any number of forms. It doesn’t need to be crude or obvious. The point is, the pain should be equivalent; not tit for tat but something comparable.”

— Sue Grafton

125. “People make mistakes. People do things they never meant to do.”

— Sue Grafton

126. “Verbal clashes seldom come to a satisfying end. They peter out in weak retorts that leave you wishing you’d been as clever in the moment as you are in reviewing the conversation later.”

— Sue Grafton

127. “I’m not saying justice is for sale, but if you have enough money, you can sometimes enjoy the benefits of a short-term lease.”

— Sue Grafton

128. “You can’t make someone else do anything, even if you know you’re right.”

— Sue Grafton

129. “Results for “I looked as respectable as the bum they were booking. I fancied I smelled better, but perhaps not. I’ve noticed that most of us don’t have a clue what we smell like to other people. It’s almost as though our noses blank us out in self-defense.”

— Sue Grafton

130. “The struggle is what teaches you.”

— Sue Grafton

131. “Growing up had made her crabby, which happens to the best of us.”

— Sue Grafton

132. “I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I’ve never stopped writing since.”

— Sue Grafton

133. “The Universe keeps track of our sins and exacts devious and repugnant punishments, like dates with unknown men.”

— Sue Grafton

134. “Kinsey was never a lawyer. She’s strictly blue collar.”

— Sue Grafton

135. “The tricky part of any lie is trying to figure out how you’d behave if you were innocent.”

— Sue Grafton

136. “Life is simple. You’re the one making things complex.”

— Sue Grafton

137. “It’s not that gray water’s boring, but the subject does have its limits.”

— Sue Grafton

138. “The downside of fitness, which takes years to achieve, is how quickly it vanishes – almost instantly.”

— Sue Grafton

139. “I stood when she reached the table and we did that fake kissing thing, looking like a pair of budgies about to peck each other to death.”

— Sue Grafton

140. “I figure guys are like Whitman’s Samplers. I like to take a little bite out of each and then move on before the whole box gets stale.”

— Sue Grafton

141. “I find it so liberating when other people are rude. It makes me feel mild and lazy and mean.”

— Sue Grafton

142. “He looked like an actor who’d star in some movie about a doomed love affair between an heiress and a park ranger. I thought it was probably inappropriate to fling myself against him and bury my nose in his chest.”

— Sue Grafton

143. “She held out her hand and we sat there together like grade-school kids on a field trip. “Line up in twos and no talking.” Life itself is a peculiar outing. Sometimes I still feel like I need a note from my mother.”

— Sue Grafton

144. “Too much virtue has a corrupting effect.”

— Sue Grafton

145. “Personally I don’t endorse the notion of mortality. It’s fine for other folk, but I disapprove of the concept for me and my loved ones. Seems unfair that we’re not allowed to vote on the matter and not one of us is excused. Who made up that rule?” – Kinsey Millhone.”

— Sue Grafton

146. “People always love it when you say their dogs are nice. Just shows you how out of touch they are.”

— Sue Grafton

147. “There is, apparently, some law of nature decreeing that all home construction must double in its projected cost and take four times longer than originally anticipated.”

— Sue Grafton

148. “Another one of life’s little jokes. I thought it was a tumor ’til it started to kick.”

— Sue Grafton

149. “You can believe anything you like.”

— Sue Grafton

150. “Pay enough for anything and it passes for taste.”

— Sue Grafton