Quotes from Sophie Hannah

Seems to me there's not much time to read about other people's lives and live your own while you're at it. If I have to choose, and I reckon I do, I'll choose living my own life over reading summat about someone else's.

He didn't subscribe to the view...that spirituality was a fast track to happiness. He believed the opposite was true: spiritual people suffered more than most.

Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who's been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.

I know better than anyone that sometimes a possibility is enough to keep a person going, even if it never becomes a reality.

I will be angry until my dying day, Mr Catchpool. Greater sinners persecuting lesser sinners in the name of morality—that's something worth raging about.

In my opinion, a superior mind counts for nothing unless accompanied by a superior heart.

The Bible, with all its rules, is simply a book written by a person or people. It ought to carry a disclaimer, prominently displayed: 'The word of God, distorted and misrepresented by man.

No, thanks,' said Sam, who had never understood why he often refused drinks he would have liked to accept.

It is hate that makes people kill, Mr Catchpool, not love. Never love. Please be rational.

I'm not convinced that stories from real life have beginnings and ends, as a matter of fact. Approach them from any vantage point and you'll see that they stretch endlessly back into the past and spread inexorably forward into the future. One is never quite able to say "That's that, then," and draw a line.

Prejudices are comforting: everyone should make sure to cultivate at least three.

Alas, the human mind is a perverse, uncontrollable organ,

Humans, as a rule, were doggedly determined not to believe in the experiences of anyone but themselves.

Als je eenmaal hebt geaccepteerd dat niemand je ooit zal begrijpen en je hebt dat overweldigende gevoel van eenzaamheid overwonnen, dan heeft het wel iets prettigs, eerlijk gezegd. Jij bent de enige deskundige in je eigen kleine wereldje, en je kunt doen waar je zin in hebt.

What they'd got was a fat, balding academic who bandied about the phrase "family annihilation", especially when there were cameras pointed at him, and mentioned the titles of books and articles he'd written to anyone who would listen; who blatantly thought he was the mutt's nuts, as Sellers had so aptly put it.

Freddy Mercury's reflections about supersonic women are making me glad that I've never met one: they sound like a bit of a handful - not very easy-going.

Poirot smoothed his mustache, as if he imagined that laughing might have shaken it out of shape.

No attack is ever really an attack on the victim. It's the perpetrator attacking an aspect of himself that he loathes. He or she.

Different people regard rules differently, no matter what those rules happen to be. Mutinous characters like me always resent constraints, even perfectly sensible ones, but there are some who welcome their existence and enforcement because it makes them feel safer. Protected.

He wondered how many new starts a person was entitled to, how many times one could say it was the other person's fault and truly believe it.

Too much self-esteem, thought Simon: the real curse of our age.

I like to savor the smell of a garden I cannot see. Do you smell it? The pine, and the lavender—oh, yes, very strongly the lavender. The nose is as important as the eyes. Ask any horticulturist." Poirot chuckled. "I think that if you and I were to meet the one who created this garden, I would make the more favorable impression upon him.

Anyone who cares more about pleasing other people than about their own happiness—anyone who believes, deep down, that everyone else matters more than they do—learns fluent dishonesty at a young age.

This is why mysteries are the best kind of stories: because you only get the truth at the very end, when you're absolutely desperate, and that way of arranging things makes you realize how scarce truth is, in stories and in life, and that it's really all that matters.