“I’m a very strong woman. I’ve been that way my whole life.”

– New York mugging victim Rose Marat, 101, who suffered a broken cheekbone in the incident but said she might have pursued her assailant if she’d been a little younger.

“We had that in the process, and lo and behold, Mr. Heytvelt gets arrested.”

– Spokane County Deputy Prosecutor Jack Driscoll, saying the unprecedented plea deal that could allow Gonzaga University basketball player Josh Heytvelt to clear his record of a drug-related felony was a coincidence, not special treatment.

“This is kinda fun. I said ‘kind of.’ “

– Idaho Gov. Butch Otter, an hour into his Tuesday meeting with the Idaho Press Club, his first question-and-answer exchange with news reporters since taking office two months earlier.

“I believe anyone dying is entitled to anything, whether it’s legal or illegal.”

– Washington state Sen. Bob McCaslin, R-Spokane Valley, who lost a wife to cancer, speaking in Olympia in support of medical marijuana.

“Maybe the president should have an attorney general who is less a personal friend and more professional in his approach.”

– U.S. Rep Dana Rohrbacher, R-Calif., who has called on Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to resign.

“Nobody called in saying they had seen this child covered with bruises.”

– Spokeswoman Kathy Spears of the Washington state Department of Social and Health Services, noting that investigators had closed a child abuse case in October on a 4-year-old girl whose father and stepmother are now charged with homicide by abuse in connection with her death last weekend.

“If today is like any other day in Washington, there are 18 children who will be abused.”

– Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich, part of a coalition of community figures urging the Legislature to spend more money on programs to prevent child abuse and neglect.

“The confession sounds like something that was taken off WhiteHouse.gov. This is precisely why people are supposed to have lawyers.”

– Human Rights Watch attorney John Sifton, who questions the validity of suspected terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confession to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks and numerous other conspicuous acts of international terrorism.

“They always say the next place we’re going is the worst – the most violent – and it never turns out to be the case. They really meant it this time.”

– Army Sgt. William Rose, a Massachusetts soldier serving with a Stryker brigade combat team out of Fort Lewis, Wash., describing the intensity of the fighting in Diyala province north of Baghdad.

“My pastor tells us that God gives everyone a gift. Finance is my gift.”

– Spokane firefighter Steve McMullen, who also runs Highland Financial LLC, a business that winds up acquiring the homes of nine out of 10 people who enter lease-option agreements with him as a strategy for escaping foreclosure.

“We do consider in a respectful way that we may truly stop the migration by building a kilometer of highway in Michoacan or Zacatecas than 10 kilometers of walls in the border.”

– Mexican President Filepe Calderon, commenting during President Bush’s visit to his country that strengthening Mexico’s infrastructure and economy would be a better way to curb illegal border-crossing than erecting a physical barrier between the two nations.

“That’s when we realized that these people don’t distinguish between the sons of our city and the soldiers. They just have an agenda to destroy.”

– Iraqi army Maj. Shabah Ahmed, describing a suicide bombing in Ramadi that helped turn some Sunnis’ sympathies away from al-Qaida and anti-U.S. insurgents.

“Let me give you the scenario: You have four months to build something that nobody has ever built before, and if you don’t the city floods and the corps, which already has a black eye, could basically be dissolved. How many people would put up with a second flooding?”

– Army Corps of Engineers resident engineer Randy Persica, talking about the agency’s decision to take a chance on installing defective pumps as a safeguard against storm-related flooding in the New Orleans area during the 2006 hurricane season.