How could the death of someone you had never met affect you so?

The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them.

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.

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

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.

In spite of her plainness that would have made wallflowers of other women, she radiated a great sense of self-importance.

Who was more conscious than the soldier of capricious fortune, of the random roll of the dice?

You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing, Strike

Ridiculous, " he said breathlessly. "You ought to give up detecting and try fantasy writing.

In the inverted food chain of fame, it was the big beasts who were stalked and hunted

Your skill, strength, and overall survival are offensive to some people. Those are definitely not your people.

Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.

The man who sows wrong thoughts and deeds and prays that God will bless him is in the position of a farmer who, having sown tares, asks God to bring forth for him a harvest of wheat.

too many maniacs not enough michelangelos

He that is drunken * * * Is outlawed by himself; all kind of ill Did with his liquor slide into his veins.

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary.

There is no issue of States' rights or National rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.

[Norden] said, with the Mark 15 Norden bombsight, he could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel at 20,000 feet.

Think before thou speakest.

Only men who have worn a ski suit understand how complicated it is for a woman to go to the bathroom when she's wearing a jumpsuit.