Quotes from Sophie Hannah

I've been alone with my thoughts for too long; I'm starting to feel unreal.

Oh, God. I can't do this. I only slightly want to have a baby. I think. I actually don't know at all.

Is Jason intelligent enough to realise that if you describe a thirty-eight-year-old woman as middle-aged, she's more likely to want to kill you than help you? Because Lauren isn't.

No ramifications whatsoever. You're not going to ramificate; you don't know what it means. You don't know which of the words I use are real words and which I'm making up

Wall of lies?' Proust muttered. 'Is that the one that borders the orchard of obsession that contains the tree of lunacy?

I'm low-level angry most of the time, never really know why,' Simon told him. 'You got the brunt of it. This time.

If we never make any changes that scare us at first, we end up missing out.

One ought not to use words carelessly, or even spontaneously. Once they are launched, they cannot be called back.

nostalgic people yearn for the past for a good reason---because they missed it, they weren't fully there when they should have been, when it was the present.

John McCrodden's anger, Poirot thought, was equal to Sylvia Rule's but different: less explosive, more enduring. He would not forget, whereas she might if a new and more pressing drama occurred.

Hugo Dockerill was the first and only letter-recipient to remain cheerful in the face of his predicament, and certainly the first to demonstrate a belief that all the world's problems could be solved if only decent people sat down at a table together and set things straight. If he objected to being accused of murder, he concealed it well.

I should like to toss Eustace on a fire! What a pity such actions are against the law. All I can say is that whoever made that particular law must never have met Eustace.

Poirot suspected Hugo Dockerill was one of the stupidest people he had ever met.

I saw no need to upset the apple cart at work by pointing out that "He's my friend's son" is neither proof of innocence nor a viable defence.

Una rutina diaria invariable es esencial para una mente sosegada,

It is not a pleasant thing, to be accused of something one has not done. One ought to be able to brush the untruths aside, but somehow they take hold of the mind and cause a spectral form of guilt--like a ghost in the head, or in the conscience! Someone is certain that you have done this terrible thing, and so you start to feel as if you have, even though you know you have not. I begin to understand, Georges, why people confess to crimes of which they are innocent.

Rowly's son, a murderer? Preposterous! He's the son of Rowland McCrodden! If you were the son of a man like that, Catchpool, would you take up murder as a way of passing the time?

I was tempted to run in the opposite direction rather than follow her anywhere.

A loose tile; Poirot could not sleep in a room with such a thing.

George looked doubtful, as he frequently did. English discretion, Poirot had observed, had an outward appearance that suggested doubt. Many of the politest English men and women he had met over the years looked as if they had been ordered to disbelieve everything that was said to them.

I have heard that he is proud, but also honourable and, most importantly of all, amenable to reason

Sometimes a gentle perambulation causes a new idea to rise to the surface of one's thoughts.

He had the kind of handsome face that one rarely encountered apart from in works of art. His features might have been chiselled by a master craftsman. [...] Poirot wondered if McCrodden had sought to cancel out the advantages that nature had bestowed on him [...] by making himself look as repellent as possible.

When someone sends something like that, they mean you harm. You ignore them at your peril.