“It was clearly a lot more difficult in the field than in the office, where you could keep your distance and maintain a calculated composure. Being faced with real people was a far tougher call on o...”

“You couldnt predict what was going to happen for one simple reason: people.”

“Kindness was too painful. It had been a long time since he had had to endure it.”

“Only a man with nothing to hide could make that kind of racket.”

“He often came back all thinky from work.”

“Mirabelle always ate her lunch on Brighton beach if the weather was in any way passable, but out of sheer principle she never paid tuppence for a chair. We did not win the war to have to pay to sit...”

“Knowing it and seeing it are two different things.”

“Believe me, It would be better if we didn't meet again. Go back to school. Go back to your life. And next time they ask you, say no. Killing is for grown-ups and you're still a child.”

“My name is Percy Jackson. I'm twelve years old. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.Am I a troubled kid?Yeah. Y...”

“Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination.They are limited to their century. No glamour every transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always fi...”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.”

“I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”