Quotes from Mo Hayder

I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.

I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.

Mr Jack Caffery', he says slowly. 'This is the truth, but don't be afraid of it. Your life will be different from this day on, but you will survive. You will continue.' 'How do you know?' 'I know because you and I? We are the same person.

I noticed that in Tokyo people didn't smell. It was funny. I couldn't smell them, and they didn't say very much: the trains were packed but it was quite silent, like being jammed into a carriage with a thousand shop-window mannequins.

Maybe that was the price of ignorance, I thought, looking at the naked vagrant. Maybe Japan had to pay for the ignorant things it did in Nanking. Because ignorance as I'd got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.

I hooked the condom out with the end of a spoon and dropped it into the bottom of a white bin-bag, where it lay, dried out and brown, as transparent as old human skin.

Wine? said Zoe. At two in the afternoon? I've decided to become an alcoholic. Just for the duration of my middle years. She filled a glass and rested it on the edge of the washbasin. That's yours.

Só porque o Turner usa aquele estilo manhoso depois das seis da tarde. Lollapalooza julga que é porreiro andar descalça e eu tenho uma cadela labrador no meu escritório, isso não significa que pode baixar os seus padrões.

It's wrong. I know, it's wrong to give up. But sometimes life just seems to be going on for such a long time." The

The Christian Church,' he went on, 'tries to pretend it doesn't exist. But other religions aren't so coy – the ancient religions, I mean, the ones born out of passion and intelligence, an understanding of the earth and the way the seasons move, not the ones spread and imposed through politics and imperialism.

Penny is thankful of nature, of the generous and non-judgemental way it orbits and replenishes itself, regardless of humanity and the stupid shit mankind tries.

I'm a post-menopausal woman who's lived in a man's world for twenty years. A more cynical, cruel creature it's hard to find.

Everyone hates him. Me – I think I can see the sun shine when he bends over.

Was it possible, he wondered, that every human is sentenced to a particular lifelong exercise of will, with a duty to accept it with grace and strength?

brother had done. He pushes the boots to one side and

Back when she was a child. Back when everything was possible and there was still hope. Still so much hope in the world.

halyard on a boat moored somewhere out

Sometimes people forget to be sympathetic and instead they blame you for everything, even for the things you did when you had no idea they were wrong.

He's in trouble, Rebecca, genuine, no-fucking-around trouble.