Quotes from Peter Robinson

The only difference was, you could play the music again and again; a life plays only once.

The victim was white, in his early thirties, five feet eleven inches tall, ten and a half stone in weight, and in good physical condition. The last part always irritated Banks: how could a corpse ever be in good physical condition ?

Banks felt more alone and further away for having just talked to Sophia than he had before her call. But it was always like that - the telephone might bring you together for a few moments, but there's nothing like it for emphasising distance.

But would she ever recover fully inside? How would she handle being alone in the house? Would she ever again be able to hear someone walking up the garden path without that twinge of fear and panic? He didn't know. The psyche regenerates itself, too, sometimes. We're often a damn sight more resilient than we'd imagine.

I have just finished "All the Colors of Darkness" 090209

Paranoia is a form of awareness.

But he couldn't feel self-pity in the face of the memorial. He hadn't lost nearly enough as these children, who'd lost their homeland and, in many cases,their whole families. Perhaps they had gained something, too, though. They had at least escaped the concentration camps, been taken in by good, caring families, and had grown up to live their lives in relative freedom.

The memories were there, but the string of time that linked them like a pearl necklace was broken.

Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.

he realized with a shock that the loss of innocence never stopped happening, that he was still losing it, that it was like a wound that never healed, and he would probably go on losing it, drop by drop, until the day he died.

He had been working at the wall for too long. Why he bothered the Lord only knew. After all, it went nowhere and closed in nothing. His grandfather had been a master waller in the dale, but the skill had not been passed down the generations. He supposed he liked is for the same reason he liked fishing: mindless relaxation. In an age of totalitarian utilitarianism, Gristhorpe thought, a man needs as much purposeless activity as he can find.

Craig wondered if the landlord knew exactly what was going on up there. If he did, he might not have been so quick to let them use it. On the other hand, the prospect of selling a few extra pints on a slow Monday night might tempt even the best of us to leave our ethics and politics at the door.

You can't let someone you love suffer an agony that gets worse every day and has no possibility of ever abating or ending, except in an even more drawn-out and painful death. Would

The Maze, that labyrinth of alleys called ginnels and snickets locally—tiny squares, courtyards, nooks and crannies and small warehouses that had remained unchanged since the eighteenth century.

Oh, Maureen. Don't be so naive. Everybody knows what it's like these days. The authorities bend over backward to help immigrants. You ought to know that, being in nursing. It's all opportunities for ethnics, not for decent, hardworking white folks.

There are some kinds of damage that take you far beyond normal rules and systems of ethics and morality—beyond this point be monsters, as the ancients used to say.

Lucy Payne was definitely a sausage or two short of the full English breakfast.

Helen Shapiro was singing "Lipstick on Your Collar." Hurst turned off

Rather glumly, he recalled the bit at the beginning of the Trollope biography he was reading, where Trollope considers the dreary sermons persuading people to turn their backs on worldly pleasure in the hope of heaven to come and asks, if such is really the case, then "Why are women so lovely?

He was at an age when every odd ache or pain brought a little more fear than it had before, when colds lingered and settled on the chest.

Haven't you sometimes thought that people's vices are often the only things that make them interesting?

And now he was dead. She didn't know how, or what had killed him, just that his body had ceased to exist.

It was hard to imagine that anything terrible could happen on such a fine spring evening, but the activity around the little terrace house in Armley indicated that evil made no allowances for the weather.

Craig laughed.