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

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?

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

Life's just a bunch of accidents, connected by one perfect end.

Those who waste time eventually become wasted

Our self-worth is not who we know or what we know. Our self-worth is in what we do.

Here's to our beloved George Washington, the Joshua of America, who commanded the sun and the moon to stand still - and they obeyed.

God loves you as do I and no matter what physical characteristics that differ from each and every one of us, we are but one family under the heavens.

life is a tragic mystery. We are pierced and driven by laws we only half understand, we find that the lesson we learn again and again is that of accepting heroic helplessness.

Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.

I've waffled before. I'll waffle again.

Don’t let anyone say you can’t do it. To be successful, you need to fail. The more failures you have, the more successes you will have. People just don’t get that.

The ideal teacher student relationship exists when the student is better than the teacher.