Quotes from Peter Abrahams

Some will tell you all you need is religion. They are wrong. You can go to church, mosque or synagogue ten times a day, pray hard and read the Scriptures as often as possible, give generous alms, and visit holy cites weekly. None of that can stop demons from rising in you, if you harbor jealousy or evil intentions toward your neighbour or fellow human.

You can't walk alone. Many have given the illusion, but none have really walked alone. Man is not made that way. Each man is bedded in his people, their history, their culture, and their values.

With Shakespeare and poetry, a new world was born. New dreams, new desires, a self consciousness was born. I desired to know to know myself in terms of the new standards set by these books.

Mom had the kind of love for her that you could feel, like it was part of the atmosphere

To get from people you had to give a piece of yourself, a real piece that mattered.

Ingrid shrugged...like Marie Antoinette hearing about the starving peasants.

Innocence is the currency. Survival is bought with innocence. You are born with an abundance of innocence and no knowledge of how to survive: you spend your life trading one for the other. But it only works one way. You can't buy back your innocence.

The problem with deep thinking was it could lead to unpleasant conclusions.

And over and over she told him she loved him. And over and over he told her he loved her. And it was always a new thing that they told each other.

You're born cute. Babies are cute. Not hard to guess why – it's so everyone will forgive them for being such a pain. You grow a little older, and people say, what beautiful hair, or get a load of those baby blues,' or something nice that keeps you thinking you're still on the cuteness track. Then you hit twelve or thirteen and boom, they tell you everything needs fixing.

Rachel turned and looked at him, and saw his tired gray eyes and his tired gray skin. If he would go away she could imagine it was yesterday.

Sometimes fear helps, he said. Like fear of flunking a test, so you study. But when bad's going to happen for sure, fear only hurts.

The power of suggestion. Maybe everything human ended up being subjective and nothing could be known for sure.

Guilt was dread without the tightness in the chest part, just the weight in the gut.

Being rich, really rich, meant you could go completely crazy, and the only result would be everyone getting so jealous they couldn't stand it.

At that moment, Ingrid remembered 'The Five Orange Pips' and maybe the most important thing Holmes told Watson: the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the ones, both before and after.

In 'A Scandal in Bohemia', he said it was a capital mistake to theorize without data, because you ended up twisting facts to suit theories instead of the other way around.

He glanced at her in what she thought seemed a normal way. Everyone else was trying to peer into her soul, to measure the pain inside.