People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?
SIR DANIEL was a large man, broad of shoulder...his eyes were rather small above the double pouches and the look they fixed on Dalgliesh gave nothing away. Looking at his bland, unrevealing face spark...
The secret of contentment is never to allow yourself to want anything which reason tells you you haven't a chance of getting.
I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.
All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the roman...
Learn to write by doing it. Read widely and wisely. Increase your word power. Find your own individual voice though practicing constantly. Go through the world with your eyes and ears open and learn t...
What mattered at fifty-eight was what had mattered at eighteen: breeding and good bone structure.
The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.
It was reasonable to struggle, to suffer, perhaps even to die, for a more just, a more compassionate society, but not in a world with no future where, all to soon, the very words justice, compassion,...
I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music...
Her aunt and uncle worked fifteen hours a day in their desperate attempt to keep the corner shop in profit, and their Sundays were marked by exhaustion. The moral code by which they lived was that of...
Henry James’s definition of the purpose of a novel: To help the human heart to know itself.
Never tell an unnecessary lie; the truth has great authority. The cleverest murders have been caught, not because they told the one essential lie, but because they continued to lie about unimportant d...
Even as a child, I had a sense that I was two people; the one who experienced the trauma, the pain, the happiness, and the other who stood aside and watched with a disinterested ironic eye.
Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.
And faded like a thin ghost into the spring air.
This is a Christian country, my dear brother, and the wages of sin are supposed to be death, not eight bob of the taxpayers’ money.
A murderer about their victim:)He was an expert in vicarious death. I should like to have been there to see how he enjoyed the real thing.
He was discovering that even hatred died a little at the end. But it still lasted longer than desire, longer even than love.
With the death of what described as rational religon and the proponents of what remains sending out such confusing and uncertain messages, all civilised people have to be ethicists. We must work out...