Quotes from Ian Rankin

like he could use a good meal. Rebus had seen more meat on a butcher's pencil.

Evil was almost …. it was almost child-like: naïve, simplistic. A game you played and then woke up from, only to find it wasn't pretend. The real-life monsters weren't grotesque: they were quiet men and women, people you passed on the street and didn't notice.

nothing ever vanished, not totally. Instead, things altered shape, substance, meaning.

You wouldn't think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we'll do it one day. That's how negligent we are.

Witches never existed, except in people's minds. All there was in the olden days was women and some men who believed in herbal cures and in folklore and in the wish to fly. Witches? We're all witches in one way or another. Witches was the invention of mankind, son. We're all witches beneath the skin.

It was the laughter of birthdays, of money found in an old pocket.

His eyes beheld beauty not in reality but in the printed word. Standing in the waiting-room, he realized that in his life he had accepted secondary experience -- the experience of reading someone else's thoughts -- over real life.

It seemed to him a very Edinburgh thing. Welcoming, but not very.

This man had something to hide, some shame in his past, and those with a past can always be bought.

Rebus was eating breakfast in the canteen and wishing there was more caffeine in the coffee, or more coffee in the coffee come to that.

There are worse forms of prostitution than whoring. -Inspector John Rebus

My father was a slave to capitalist ideology. He didn't know what he was doing." "You mean you went to an expensive school?

About a tiresome colleague]: He could bore for Scotland.

trapped in limbo, believing in a lack of belief, but not necessarily lacking the belief to believe.

He wondered what percentage of the world's art was actually kept in bank vaults and the like. Like unread books and unplayed music, did it matter that art went unseen?

Rebus reminded himself to stop praying. Perhaps if he stopped praying, God would take the hint and stop being such a bastard to one of his few believers on this near-godforsaken planet.

Rebus drank his coffee and felt his head spin. He was feeling like the detective in a cheap thriller, and wished that he could turn to the last page and stop all his confusion, all the death and the madness and the spinning in his ears.

War created bizarre allies, while peace itself could be divisive.

It's easier if you do a handstand,' commented Rebus. 'What is?' 'Talking out of your arse.

Was it all inevitable, John?" Reeve was pushing his fingers across the floor of the cell, seated on his haunches. I was lying on the mattress. Yes," I said. "I think it was. Certainly, it's written that way. The end of the book is there before the beginning's hardly started.

I've just worked out what the music on the speakers is," he said. "It's John Martyn, Over The Hill." "And ?" "And nothing. It's just, maybe I'm not there yet.

Chialer, c'était bon quand on perdait au foot, qu'on vous racontait des histoires d'animaux héroïques, ou en entendant "Flower of Scotland" après l'heure de fermeture.

At the time, most bodies worked on by anatomists were cold indeed. They were brought to Edinburgh from all over Britain -- some came by way of the Union Canal. The resurrectionists -- body-snatchers -- pickled them in whisky for transportation. It was a lucrative trade." "But did the whisky get drunk afterwards?" Devlin chuckled. "Economics would dictate that it did.

Often he declined invitations, because to accept meant that he had to dust off his brogues, iron a shirt, brush down his best suit, take a bath, and splash on some cologne. He had also to be affable, to drink and be merry, to talk to strangers with whom he had no inclination to talk and with whom he was not being paid to talk. In other words, he resented having to play the part of a normal human animal.