Quotes from Kerry Greenwood

The Albion was a spacious pub, built in the days when a public house with any pretensions to gentility had to have fourteen foot ceilings, brass taps and a polished wooden bar you skate down. ... Bert, in his reflective moments, considered that if heaven didn't have a well-appointed pub where a man could sit down over a beer for a yarn with the other angels, then he didn't want to go there.

This was cheering. The real world was still there, it still contained puppies being puppies and cats being cats.

And is it any wonder that the poor woman broke out into fairies when she had been deprived of any fiction in her youth?

To Hell with all racialists,' she said aloud. 'And to Hell with eugenics, degenerate heredity, miscegenation and frauds who pile up skulls like a conqueror as well. May they choke on their bones.' A passing gentleman boggled at her and crossed to the other side of La Trobe Street. 'There is no place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven,' she added, rolling the phrase over her tongue and filing it for future reference.

Don't be silly, Phryne, I'm an—' 'Invert?' said Phryne. 'Of course you are.' She said this as though he had just claimed to have blue eyes, as something utterly ordinary. 'And that means,' John persisted, 'that I am a sinner.' 'Rubbish,' said Phryne sharply. 'No one can help whom they love. I am positive that your God doesn't care a fig.

I gave chase, and he took a shot at me, so I did the only thing I could in the circumstances…. I stabbed him in the shoulder.

She was always over the horizon, chasing stars.

His voice was heavy with Slavic fatalism.

Money can't buy happiness but it can vastly improve the quality of your misery.

The Colonel was far too firmly married and full of military honours to be a threat to Phryne's virtue, or what remained of it, so she agreed.

Phryne always existed as a still, self-possessed point in a maelstrom. Usually she had created the maelstrom herself.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants: it is the creed of slaves. William Pitt Speech to the House of Commons, 1783

Phryne opened her book and sipped her lemonade. Agatha Christie. What a plotter. Phryne wished briefly that the real world was so amenable to being solved. ***

My dear, the furniture is all castoffs. No point in having good furniture if you have children. One would be forever telling them not to bounce on the couch. Too fatiguing for me and too irritating for them.

Tinker wrote neatly, though his spelling was not good, Ruth's recipes would never fail for confusion between 'add sugar' and 'seethe', but Jane's writing looked like an intoxicated inky spider had staggered across the page on the way to the bar for another drink. Which it really didn't need.

One invited artists to social events, but only for the pleasure of their company. To invite singers or dancers to perform for their supper was inexpressively vulgar, and deserved a prompt and stinging rebuke.

the folly of men makes me seriously angry.

not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living!

They are not aesthetic like a puppy or a kitten. In fact, they always look drunk to me. Look at that one—you'd swear he had been hitting the gin.

She restored herself with a cocktail and an excellent lobster mayonnaise. Phryne was devoted to lobster mayonnaise, with cucumbers.

His dad had always told him that the red-faced were blusterers, not to be taken seriously. 'But if you see a bloke who's pale and shaking, son,' Bert's father had instructed, 'then run like blazes, because he might flamin' kill you.

Bert was short and stout. Cec was tall and lanky. Between them, there was nothing that they could not reach.

We took the peaches to bed. It is always nice to have someone else to lick the peach juice off your breast.

All this display, while the working classes were pinched beyond bearing; it was not wise, or tasteful: it smacked of ostentatious wealth. The Europe from which Phryne had lately come was impoverished, even the nobility; and was keeping its head down, still shocked by the Russian revolution. It had become fashionable to make no display; understatement had become most stylish.