Towards Zero

When you read the account of a murder - or, say, a fiction story based on murder - you usually begin with the murder itself. That's all wrong. The murder begins a long time beforehand. A murder is the culmination of a lot of different circumstances, all converging at a given moment at a given point. People are brought into it from different parts of the globe and for unforeseen reasons. [...] The murder itself is the end of the story. It's Zero Hour.” He paused. “It's Zero Hour now.

I suppose, like most young people nowadays, boredom is what you dread most in the world, and yet, I can assure you, there are worse things.

It's extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often - both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.

Whether he acted rightly or not, I have never been sure. It was the future of a child that was at stake. A child, he felt, ought to be given the benefit of a doubt.

It has been my experience, that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.

Oh, I leave it to your imagination, Mr. Latimer. I would not presume to give you advice, you know. The advice of such elderly fogeys as myself is invariably treated with scorn. Rightly so, perhaps, who knows? But we old buffers like to think that experience has taught us something. We have noticed a good deal, you know, in the course of a lifetime.” A