Quotes from Charles Todd

During high school I worked in a retirement home. I spent many wonderful hours hearing from service men and their widows about WWI.

I firmly believe as an author you have to go out in life and hear the stories of people. In pubs in the UK or a retirement home in the US it is the stories of others that bring a book to life.

I was always a killer. It was my skill, and they'd taught me well. She taught me love.

I hadn't realized that a break in a bone could be so exquisitely painful. I'd feel a greater tolerance for the the wounded after this.

Courage will keep her safer than fear.

or mop up vomit and other bodily fluids from

I've found that being with someone you love, whatever the arrangement, is better than being alone. I sank my pride long ago, in exchange for her company.

Nicholas was already tall for his age, dark unruly hair and dark eyes, although in the photograph you couldn't tell if they were brown or dark blue.

He knew what loss was, how the mind refuses to believe, the way the body aches with a need that can't be satisfied, and the awful, endless desolation of the spirit.

I thought about that long drive in the

The writer was coming into maturity, looking at life and death as if they were the same, a coming from darkness and a returning to it, a brief, bright, glorious span that was often marred by man's own incapacity to learn and trust.

Releasing Quarles from the brace

Then I'll take you there.

and take good care of it." "Henri's neck

For a moment the man from London and the woman in mourning considered each other in silence, each gauging temperament from the slender evidence of appearance.

Politics could be cruel and heartless. And I was afraid, with the tensions in Ireland, that it could also be deadly.

I wasn't there, I wasn't there." The final failure, in the father's eyes. "Nor was God," Rutledge said, and sat with the grieving man for another quarter of an hour, until he was calmer.

Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, was well into his sixties. His wife, the Empress Elisabeth, had been assassinated years before by an anarchist, his only son had died in a murder-suicide pact, and now the Archduke, his heir, was dead. The fate of Europe might well depend on what a bitter old man decided.

Ye ken, it's the living and no' the dead who know the truth. The dead still beileve it was worth dying for.

Hughes has to say. In the cold light of morning

What could have been Henry Cutter's

Boys have never been to war. It's easy to believe that it's all a game. That the dead will get up off the grass in time for tea.

mother's eyes widen

took a deep breath. In for a penny, in for a pound .