“Even those we’ve loved all our lives are highly unlikely to be perfect.”
“what that meant. He could spend the night”
“One of the women was a natural bitch – all women recognise them, but men rarely do.”
“I’d begun to feel as if there was a creeping deadness inside me, encroaching on the calm and replacing it with a black void, a vacuum where emotion should be. And the deadness was growing and penetrating every corner of my soul, reaching out its dark tentacles to smother all natural reactions.”
“at the guest house in Anglesey,’ Tom stated.”
“But nobody was there; nobody was even looking.”
“The girl was smiling as she left the noisy, packed pub, and shouts of laughter were ringing in her ears as she wrestled the heavy door open, letting in an icy blast of cold air. She”
“her way and a few arms were raised in a farewell salute, but most were otherwise occupied with pint glasses, or were gesticulating wildly to emphasise”
“The dark night settled around her and the sudden silence hit her like a physical blow. For a moment she stood still.”
“But now I realise that I’ve settled for mediocrity. How had I let it happen? How did I lose myself?”
“If a man tries to steal your wife, the best form of revenge is to let him have her.”
“of sorrow and distress, or something else”
“Right – let’s talk about this woman.’ Becky”
“The waiting – the uncertainty and the frustration of being unable to do anything – is unbearable.”
“It’s been hard to maintain the outward image of the old me for Robert’s sake while simultaneously”
“single moment – the scuffing of a shoe,”
“Have you ever looked obsession in the face, Chief Inspector? Strip away the mask of normality, and it’s a hideous, contorted serpent that lurks beneath the skin, writhing with frustration until the object of its desire is under its control.”
“off to fling over the back of a chair, and made his”
“I should have known what might happen. I should have understood better what Robert had been telling me in everything but words. It’s now three hours since he left with my babies, and every bone and muscle in my body is aching with their loss.”
“Has there been in an accident?”
“For a moment, I can’t speak so”
“or perhaps because of, her natural aloofness and her ability to withdraw and view things without emotion. The fact that this extended to her own life, leaving her appearing cold and distant, was beside the point.”
“People do all sorts of daft things for no reason that anybody else can understand...”
“Whenever elephants met men, elephants fared badly. Syria's final elephants were exterminated by twenty-five hundred years ago. Elephants were gone from much of China literally before the year 1 and much of Africa by the year 1000. Meanwhile, in India and southern Asia, elephants became the mounts of kings; tanks against forts, prisoners' executioners, and pincushions of arrows, driven mad in battle; elephants became logging trucks and bulldozers, and, as with other slaves, their forced labor requires beatings and abuse. Since Roman times, humans have reduced Africa's elephant population by perhaps 99 percent. African elephants are gone from 90 percent of the lands they roamed as recently as 1800, when, despite earlier losses, an estimated twenty-six million elephants still trod the continent. Now they number perhaps four hundred thousand. (The diminishment of Asian elephants over historic times is far worse.) The planet's menagerie has become like shards of broken glass; we're grinding the shards smaller and smaller.”
“It is facile to condemn the French for giving in to the Nazis too easily when many French citizens would have still borne the horrendous scars of the first occupation, would have clearly remembered having to stand back while German sentries robbed them of everything but the nearly inedible ration bread because the only alternative was to be arrested, beaten, or shot. The French survived not one but two brutal occupations in a span of less than forty years, and deserve more credit for their flinty endurance than they receive.”
“There’s an Oriental saying I like: “If aggression meets empty space it tends to defeat itself.”
“Champion Ven knelt in the ruins of the village. Sifting through the rubble, he lifted out a broken doll, its pink dress streaked with dirt and its pottery face cracked.
There was always a broken doll.
Why did there always have to be a damn doll?”
“There’s not a lot you can control, you know. Where you’re born. Who your family is. What people want from you, and what you are, underneath it all. When you have so little say in it all, I think it’s important to exercise a measure of control when given the opportunity.” She smiled, ducking her head. “So I blow things up.”
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