Quotes from Ruth Rendell

Stanley looked at him truculently.

in case anyone might think I was snooping.

When you get old," she had said on the occasion of her brother Tom's dying, "you don't have much emotion. It goes. At about seventy, I'd say. All those things and people you were passionate about, angry or adoring or longing, they all go, and a kind of dull calm takes over. I

figure. She was with her more than the other occupants of the house. "You're beginning to get stout, Bertha," she said, using

short and long whitish sticks and thinner white sticks and something like a long, curved rod with ridges all along its length.

tell them all this? Wexford had no idea. Because

I know someone said that even a really bad liar tells more truth than lies, but you still can't tell what are lies and what truth, can you?

aglow with light from Room

personal affront and, in a way, a desecration

therapy, a quick assuagement. But there

were altered and aggrandised by enormous fantasy.

book, banging in the full stops until it looked as if he would break his pen.

lady," a word she had found out came from the Anglo-Saxon "lafdig," meaning "she who makes the bread.

Caspian burst into gales of laughter. "I suppose you were

insinuating approach a child molester would use? "If you

hair, oiled and satiny

This would be a feather in its cap.

most thumbed

in a squalid, run-down house in the worst

home. Recognizing him, she said this before he

I'd never really

some Haitian gangster-cum-political bigwig. He had seen such characters

mauve-grey envelope

He had a reasonable job as an actuary (whatever that was)