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?

Man is diminished if he lives without knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast.

What the detective story is about is not murder but the restoration of order.

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

the most successful marriages were always based on both partners feeling that they had done rather well for themselves.

What a child doesn't receive he can seldom later give.

Any visitor to an historic country town or city quickly becomes aware in his or her peregrinations that the most attractive houses in the centre are invariably the offices of lawyers.