Quotes from Martha Grimes

And so it continued all day, wynde after wynde, from a room beyond came the whistle of a teakettle. "Now, you really must join me. I've some marvelous Darjeeling, and some delicious petits fours a friend of mine gave me for Christmas.

If a cone had dropped on velvet needles, if a star had lain a silver track across the sky, if the dead had turned in their graves - I swear, I would have heard it, that's how silent it all was.

Losing one's mind is surely like losing one's virginity. Lose a little, lose a lot.

Polly was a writer of many deadlines. There were the ignorable deadlines, the not-to-be-taken-too-seriously deadlines: the deadlines-before-the-deadlines deadlines, and finally, the no-kidding-around deadlines. She set these various dates, she'd told him, to fool herself.

Old willows trailed veils of wet leaves across his path. Moss crawled up the headstones. The place was otherwise deserted.

Perhaps he was fit for the life of a hermit. Give up all of his worldly possessions and go live in a hut on a shelf of rock and watch the sunrise every morning. Up before the sun! What a dreadful idea; he shuddered.

I read somewhere that we never completely forget a thing, that there are the imprints of everything we've ever seen or done, all of these tiny details at the bottoms of our minds, like pebbles and weeds that never surface from a river bottom.

As he followed Wood, Jury thought: one disappearance, two auto accident victims, one in a mental institution, one drowned. One murdered. Rackmoor, for all its bracing sea air, didn't seem the healthiest place in the British Isles.

Tom says to Richard: You asked what I missed about the job. And that's it. But his tone had changed. The vanished fame, the lost acclaim, the old success.

He suspected, given her editorial experience, that she was in her fifties, but she had been coiffed, massaged, starved, and sunlamped down to forty.

They're an idea of home, I think. Words are. It really is like opening a door, isn't it, to open a book. If that's not too sentimental to say. Books, words, stories are a kind of solace.

Before Ernest could start walking back the cat, Melrose put in, "But isn't it rather we who have come here, Mrs. Attaboy?" At her uncomprehending look, he plowed on. "It is their country." "What? Africa?" "If Africa were a country, the answer would be yes.

Macalvie, that was an incredibly lachrymose question.

They stood now in the low, dimly lit hall, hung about with sporting prints and stuffed birds, his aunt and Simon Matchett making small talk smaller.

mind," he said. "I'll just get it then.

Emma, I want to tell you something about being right: being right is much harder on a person than being wrong.

Love was rather terrifying. Something so hard to find should not be so easily lost.

Sheba, who didn't especially like me, although she did serve me cookies when I was here before. I'd managed to get rid of them. My mother's cookies had spoiled me for anyone else's. I think I crumbled up Sheba's and tossed them off the porch. "How are you, Mr. Queen? I'm real sorry to