Quotes from Gretta Mulrooney

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is To have a thankless child.

He felt a wistfulness for things lost and irretrievable.

Graham Greene, Beryl Bainbridge, Barbara Vine, Seamus Heaney, some Dan Turner — Hollywood Detective, and Shakespeare's sonnets.

suppose. I don't care what anyone's dietary preferences are but I didn't like the feeling I was being preached to.

It's exhausting, tiptoeing around someone who barges into your life with good intentions.

She lifts her face to the breeze and lets her unhappiness lie quiet, like a calmed baby who will grow fractious again when it wakes to the difficult business of living.

the numerous ways in which you can destroy love. You can fritter it away, through flirting and affairs. You can fail to pay it attention and watch it wither. You can poison it with arguments and bad blood. You can give up on it without even realising, preoccupied in your own corner. You can let it slip through your fingers as you scan the horizon, believing that there is someone, something better elsewhere.

Sometimes I really do wonder if everything is just random and pointless, whether there's any meaning to anything in this life.

plenty of decent people whose lives had been shattered by random events.

it can be hard when you're pedalling furiously below water to stay afloat.

may you live as long as you want to and want to as long as you live.

Isn't there a saying that friends are God's apology for families?

he came down. 'Two days. I had a

Melanie. From what I understand, you were

Treacle? What does it mean?' Roscoe grinned. 'Cockney rhyming slang. Treacle as in treacle tart as in sweetheart.

the sky was shrugging away the clouds

Hope is tricky, slippery; it's a door opening and then slamming in your face. The