Quotes from Charles Todd

I've learned that life is never what you expect it will be. Just as you come to the fringes of happiness, touching it, feeling it, tasting it—and desperately hoping for the rest of it—it's jerked away." "You have your art." "Yes, but that's a compulsion, not happiness. I paint because I must. I love because I want to be loved in return. Wanted to be.

But I couldn't hear what he was saying.

and left his bicycle well hidden behind the stone wall

the frisson of fear that comes from knowing that you're safe even while the tigers noisily devour your neighbor.

O. A. Manning's poetry

Justice, he thought, has many faces, but they don't always include mercy.

The revolver was swifter and the darkness came faster. Max Hume had known what he was about.

Nursing Service.

They'll never grow old—never feel fear and cold, hunger or pain, or the sorrows of lost love or the pity of the young. While they have missed much, these men who won't see their sons in their mothers' arms, or the moon over a summer sea, or the beauty of a rose, they have what we all look for in the end—eternal springtime. It is not their grief but ours that haunts us.

I dared not make a mistake…

I have left a part of me wherever I have lain my head, including my youth. What remains will be satisfied to go home.

Well-intentioned people are often blind to the results of their good deeds.

It was a miracle, finding myself a father. I can't tell you. He was so small, and yet so real. He moved, he made sounds, he opened his eyes and stared into my face. His hands clutched at my fingers. It was unexpected, the depth of my feelings for him even then. I'd have done anything for him. Died for him if need be. Nothing I'd ever done to that point in my life seemed half so important.

men showed. I'd grown up on the tales of feuds and clan

dark periods when living seems to be harder than giving up. Have you never felt that death seemed a friend you could turn to gladly?" Hamish

When self-doubt awakens, it feeds on itself. . . .

Guilt was—it was the agony of spirit that made every day bleak. The fear that you might not live up to the cost of your survival—that you might not, somehow, justify the whim of fate that let Death miss you and take so many around you.

That's the point of working with one's hands, you see. It gives the mind something else to do besides worry.

I decided to become a policeman to speak for the dead. They have no one else, you see. Somewhere there's always proof of what happened, some piece of evidence that will obtain a conviction. It's important for the guilty to be brought to justice, I think. Without justice, there's chaos.

Tell me something. Why is everyone so determined to believe Wilton is innocent?" Surprised, Davies said, "He's a war hero isn't he? Admired by the King and a friend of the Prince of Wales. He's visited Sandringham, been received by Queen Mary herself! A man like that doesn't go around killing people!" With a wry downturn of his lips, Rutledge silently asked, How did he win his medals, you fool, if not by being so very damned good at killing?

Revenge was personal as a rule. Otherwise it was pointless.

Children were quick to grasp the subtleties of emotions around them, to see through evasions and quickly identify prevarication.

Now he realized that somehow those who had served in France and elsewhere knew a world that couldn't be shared. How could he tell his sister—or even his father, if the elder Rutledge was still alive—what had been done on bloody ground far from home? It would be criminal to fill their minds with scenes that no one should have to remember. No one.

Courage is not measured by Marching bands and banners in the wind. If you have not walked The bloody lines and seen the faces, You have no right to describe it so. We die here to keep you safe at home, And what we suffer Pray you may never know.