45 quotes found
“There are always loose ends in real life.”
“There's pride and then there's stupidity.”
“Forever encased in the amber of a writer's prose.”
“The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.”
“You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing, Strike”
“How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?”
“He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the l...”
“How easy it was to capitalize on a persons own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a...”
“The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.”
“He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks....”
“the walking stick, like a burqa, conferred protective status...”
“Couples tended to be of roughly equivalent personal attractiveness, though of course factors such as money often seemed to secure a partner of significantly better looks than oneself.”
“The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.”
“She wuz depressed. Yeah, she wuz on stuff for it. Like me. Sometimes it jus' takes you over. It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nill”
“It's an illness," she said, although she made the words sound like "it's uh nillness." Nillness, thought Strike, for a second distracted. Sometimes illness turned slowly to nillness, as was happeni...”
“...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who w...”
“In the depths of his tiredness, surrounded by these blank, sheep-like visages, he found himself pondering the accidents that had brought all of them into being. Every birth was, viewed properly, me...”
“Hers was the kind of family that commissioned painters to immortalize its young: a background utterly alien to Strike, and one he had come to know like a dangerous foreign country.”
“There were friends all over London who would welcome his eagerly to their homes, who would throw open their guest rooms and their fridges, eager to condole and to help. The price of all of those co...”
“Hard to remember these days that there was a time you had to wait for the ink and paper reviews to see your work excoriated. With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michik...”
“In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance.”
“Strike was becoming steadily more taciturn, his expression brooding. Robin wondered whether this was because he was hungryhe was a man who needed regular sustenance to maintain an equable moodor fo...”
“Matthew would not like this, she had said. He would have liked it even less had he know how much Strike had liked it.”
