Quotes from Ruth Rendell

I love memory sticks. They seem to me to be magic.

And with an inventiveness no one would have suspected from the standard of Stanley's school work:

He allowed the doors of his mind to burst open and me to read what lay within. It was so clear that I wonder all those present did not read it. The passions and unwise desires blazoned in fiery letters.

It was as if my soul had become one of those limestone figures on the west front of our cathedral and some restorer, incompetent at his craft, was chipping away at it with a sharp tool flaying its surface and splintering off those soft perceptive parts so that at last only a plain featureless nothing would remain.

your own now.

Subjects under discussion droned about me swooped and twittered like birds of passage and birds of prey.

Her mind that I have never claimed to read must be a place where slimy things swim and jostle pale eyed as in some subterranean sink.

Only novels! Only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language!

Was it possible people were heavier dead than alive?

Stanley was affable, even considerate.

We are original in our happy moments. Sorrow has only one voice, one cry.

Cleaning bored her. She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to.

The winter before he was sixteen, Pup sold his soul to the devil.

As in most cases when the truth becomes clear you wonder how you could ever have seen things differently.

for. One of its headlamps was broken and its chrome rim

It's a mystery how you know what to do, what to say, how to frame a prayer.

scuttled through

Now I have to telephone.

euphoria he felt after

an early harbinger of the winter to come. Stanley

stumped in at ten past ten, wearing a checked windcheater that looked as if it was made from a car rug

Don't hate anyone," she had said. "It's quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated." So

Forcing the carefully planned lie out with all the casualness he could muster, he said

And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes Ã¢â'¬Â¦