Quotes from Michael Robotham

The jigsaw puzzles have so many missing pieces, we play a game called What the Fuck Is That.

Fairness is a hair colour not something to be balanced on a set of scales.

They trap us like that—babies—with one look they can take hold of our hearts because our hearts have no defenses against such beauty and fragility.

Women think they want a man but instead they want

Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are." —Julie Buntin, Marlena

Why do people think everything will be better if they pour boiling water on dried leaves?

Farley goes quiet. I let the silence build until it fills every corner of the room. It leaks into his ears and his chest and his bladder and his bowels and every dark place in his mind. Very few people are comfortable with silence. It's one thing to be on a plane or in a train carriage or in a waiting room and to ignore those around you, but not when you know someone is expecting you to answer.

In a deep psychological sense, we have no self unless we have a secret. We grab for them whenever we begin losing ourselves in our social group or work or marriage. We reassert our identity as somebody apart.

beach, eating ice-cream cones or taking donkey rides. Blackpool is where she first rode roller skates and let a boy kiss her. She went in a talent show and sang a Cyndi Lauper song about girls

Children are like time capsules that we shoot into the future, hoping there will still be a world for them to inherit. I don't know if they are chips off the same block, or if one apple has fallen farther from the tree, but what does it matter? They are loved. Longed for. Ours.

I've been called a skank, a whore, a whinger, and a slut.

Karate has helped me to control my temper, but my tongue still needs a handbrake or a dead man's switch.

Remember, Joseph, the worst hour of your life only lasts for sixty minutes.

Perhaps that's the best way to ward off my demons—to have one of them at home.

is so fundamental to our existence; it is wired into our DNA. That's why babies learn to fake cry before they're a year old and to bluff by the age of two. By four a child is an accomplished liar, and by five, he or she realises that truly outrageous lies are less likely to be believed.

My beautiful black Labrador

People think they want the truth, but the opposite is true. Honesty is mean and rough and ugly, while lying can be kinder, softer and more humane. It's not honesty that we want, but consideration and respect.

Men always imagine that women are bonded by ideas of sisterhood and solidarity, but we pick our fights and our friends.

Everyone has three hearts - one they show to strangers, one they show to the people they love, and the last one that isn't shown to anyone...the one that's normally most damaged,

Have you ever had a patient who didn't want to be gay?" "Yes." "Did you try to fix them?" "There was nothing to fix. I can't change someone's sexuality. I help them come to terms with who they are. I help them cope with their own nature.

Every excursion or expedition we take is a story, an inner narrative that we sometimes don't even realise we're following.

It isn't what we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's what we know for sure that just isn't so.

I think that sometimes you can forget what the truth is if you hear a lie often enough.

You know why I love dogs more than people?" she shouts, everything about her softer. "Feed them and pet them and they'll love you when no one else will.