Quotes from Denise Mina

how close I came to suicide. Trina was right. It is a passing impulse, a signal that change is needed. If I had done it I wouldn't be here, in a giant bed in Paris, having my sore face kissed by tiny lips. I was in the afterwards, it was glorious, and a lot of people didn't make it here. That is all I'm saying about that.

I wanted to say that rapist footballers and billionaires and hired hit men were the people who were making things difficult for me, not allies.

She had sounded progressively more and more tipsy

Nikki said he got Susan pregnant when she was thirteen.' Lizzie nods and cringes and gives a little grunt. 'It's very young.' She grunts non-committally again, shrugs and takes another biscuit. 'I can't explain that you.' 'Isn't he a paedophile then?' 'Yeah, technically. But then he was still with her until she was nineteen, so then what?

Insistent birds were chorusing and the sky was smeared pink and blue like Cinderella´s dress as they nodded off.

As with all great natural beauties, she simultaneously doesn't feel attractive and frets about losing her looks. She once flew to London and spent two hundred and fifty quid having her hair dyed the same colour as it was when she left.

or Puritans sailing to America seeking religious freedom.

Beautiful women like Julia have a hard hand to play, so much is projected on to them, they get bulldozed all the time.

They drive an Avis Grey Lady, a car that costs the same as a modest house.

like a pernickety bandit.

I don't understand why people monologue about what they don't want to eat as if it's interesting.

Certain things had to be done in certain ways to mark the end of the cycle of events; like secular voodoo, it helped to resolve matters, signifying and punctuating.

She knew that everything he did was wrong and the fault was hers. He pulled his notebook out of his pocket, stupidly.

She scratched the back of her neck slowly with her nails, ripping long, deep welts, trying to chase it away. Numbness is worse than pain: it's like a violent wasting disease when all connection with the outside world evaporates, nothing matters, nothing counts, nothing touches or entertains or surprises; even physical sensations feel distant and unreal. It's death without the paperwork.

He was determined to take responsibility but he was just a cog. She'd seen that many times before. It was a belief often borne of a traumatic childhood, it was so much more manageable to believe himself bad than the world.

Strangers in the Night" because their granny told them that when nice girls whistled Our Lady cried. Her sister smiled a little, looked down at her rosary beads, and carried on.

His head was tipped back, eyes shut tight as he murdered Neil Young's "Heart of Gold.

Why's it called the Battlefield Rest?" "You don't know this area?" "No." "Mary Queen of Scots fought her last battle here. Against her son's army. She lost.

The housing stock along the broad Edinburgh Road was a linear map of a century of social housing, from scrubby squares of muddy grass around garden city dreams, to high-rise machines for living. Occasionally they passed a wall of undemolished tenements, the old housing design that had worked in the city for centuries.

He stopped at an intersection, panting, rubbing at the twinge in his hamstrings, looking around, though he knew no cars were coming in either direction. Dropping forward at the waist Martin admitted that he was fucking himself up. Dr Leonowsky told him: hurting yourself is an articulation of self-disgust. It helps no one, prevents nothing. This wasn't a glorious loss of control, he was fooling himself, it was self-harm.

The bride throws money away because she won't need her own money any more, once she's married.

I hadn't inherited my fate. I didn't need to pass it on to my girls. None of it was inevitable.

Oh God, Leon's laugh. So dark and wild you could drown a bag of kittens in it.

Give me the man until he is seven, as Nietzsche said.