Suicide is the most private and mysterious of acts, inexplicable because the chief actor is never there to explain it.

I don't want anyone to look to me, not for protection, not for happiness, not for love, not for anything.

He didn't want her; he wanted me. Well, you know how it is." Dalgliesh did know. This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn't love you. Worse still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world's poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?

Books of quotations ... afford me one of the most undemanding but satisfying forms of reading pleasure.

Great literature cannot grow from a neglected or impoverished soil. Only if we actually tend or care will it transpire that every hundred years or so we might get a Middlemarch.

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?

Feel, he told himself, feel, feel, feel. Even if what you feel is pain, only let yourself feel.