The #1 reason I started this blog was to have a place I could save (and later find) stuff. Lines from movies, favorite quotes from books, a photo, etc. Additionally, I save stuff in a folder in the cloud. AI tools like Gemini offer interesting and creative ways to look at these archives. Below are ten quotes of a philosophical nature from Crime Fiction novels I’ve read.
- “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.” — “O” Is for Outlaw, Sue Grafton
- “Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn’t blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won’t cheat, then you know he never will.” — A Deadly Shade of Gold, John D. MacDonald
- “Civilization seems to be something we choose when it fits our purpose.” — A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane
- “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, dear man.” — A Murder of Quality, John le Carré
- “Sometimes it’s a dog-eat-dog world and the rest of the time it’s the other way around.” — A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, Lawrence Block
- “The whole legal system—if you think it’s just a big set of rules, you’re dead wrong. It’s really a bunch of people sitting around and talking to each other, deciding what they want to do with you.” — A Cold Day in Paradise, Steve Hamilton
- “Real power around the world does not reside with governments any longer, but with private interests. Real power is secret power.” — A Firing Offense, David Ignatius
- “I believe in God, but not as a he or she or an it, but as something that defines my ability to conceptualize within the rather paltry frames of reference I have on hand.” — A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane
- “Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living… the measured and guided study of the history of man’s reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why?” — A Deadly Shade of Gold, John D. MacDonald
- “Even our most arbitrary actions are the result of the trips we take down our mental highways.” — A Little Yellow Dog, Walter Mosley
Pretty sure my list would have been different but I see that as a feature, not a bug.