Quotes from Sophie Hannah

Lies were lethal, however honourable the intentions of the liar. They deprived people of the opportunity to know the basic facts of their own lives.

Weak people always attack strong people - it's safer. It's weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Stong people can walk away - no repercussions, you see, if you attack a stong person.

Its weak people who are dangerous, who lash out uncontrollably and hurt you back. Strong people can walk away- no repercussions, you see, if you attack a strong person.

One cannot do such harm to another and not wound one's own soul in the process.

when your world falls apart and everything's ruined, you lose part of yourself. Not all, inconveniently. One half, the best half, dies. The other half lives.

You can always, and easily, give somebody the gift of hope and faith, even in the midst of despair.

We manufacture anger to give ourselves the illusion of power when we feel weak and helpless.

Tell them I've two spare rooms here. It might not be as grand as the Bloxham, but everybody's still alive when they wake up in the morning.

we cannot help how we feel, but we can choose whether or not to act upon those feelings.

That's not me talking, it's your inner voice. I'd attempt the accent, only I don't speak low self-esteem. It's a language I've never needed to learn.

Sometimes, convenience has the appearance of logic.

She was irritated, briefly, by the thought that she might be becoming more mature. Why should she become a better person when no one else did?

It is the job of art to replace unhappy true stories with happier inventions.

But we'll stumble on, she and I, into our messy future. And we'll have each other

I thought to myself that a conversation was a strange thing that could take you almost anywhere. Often you were left stranded miles from where you had started, with no idea about how to get back.

What you cannot imagine, you cannot fear.

Good sense appears the most underhand of tactics to a man who has no reserves of his own to draw upon.

Simon would disapprove, in the way that people who lacked life experience always disapproved of others having adventures they had so far missed out on.

Why treat the people closest to you like strangers?

You know how I feel about Occam's Razor. The simplest answer isn't usually the right one. Devious and unlikely is everywhere.' 'You ought to launch your own theory: Occam's Beard, you could call it.

If something is in a person's head, then it is real," Poirot said.

If there's an aspect of your life that's making you unhappy and you can escape from it, why wait? Too many people stick around and try to improve things, which often means slogging your guts out to compensate for the deficiencies of others. Personally, I'm a fan of the discard: leave it; move on.

Sometimes the person everyone is afraid of alarming or offending has a slightly less fixed idea about what sort of person they are, and they're neither alarmed nor offended. Unaware that others have carved their likes and dislikes in the psychological equivalent of stone, they dare to make exceptions to their own rules in a way that their nearest and dearest might not.

If you only have one world, one life, then however brilliant it is most of the time, you have nowhere to run when you need to escape from it for a while.