Somehow, she was always there when you needed her. The trouble was, she was also there when you didn’t.
Try to Kill the Children!
Adrian Lockwood was the sort of man who was hard to dislike although he was doing everything he could to help us on our way.
And I can absolutely see her beating someone to death because she was annoyed with them. Mind you, she’d probably torture them first by reading them one of her poems.
It meant nothing to me. You can stick a piece of metal on a coward and a liar but it won’t change what he is.
Everything in life has a pattern and a coincidence is simply the moment when the pattern becomes briefly visible.
What makes them dangerous is their belief that they should not be stopped, that they are justified in what they do. I will not speak of my experiences in the war, but I will say this. The greatest evil occurs when people, no matter what their aims or their motives, become utterly convinced that they are right.
Diana Cowper had planned her funeral and she was going to need it. She was murdered about six hours later that same day.
If you stand too close to the sun you can’t complain when all you become as a silhouette.
I hurried forward and entered the church. The interior was huge, cluttered, draughty, a collage of different centuries. It was probably unhappy to have arrived at this one: the twelfth century had provided the arches, the sixteenth the lovely wooden ceiling, the eighteenth the altar – and what had the twenty-first bestowed upon St Michael? Atheism and indifference.
There were books everywhere, hundreds of them on shelves that had been designed to fit into every nook and cranny, and it goes without saying that anyone who collects books can’t be all bad.
When the doorbell rings at three in the morning, it’s never good news. Alex Rider was woken by the first chime. His eyes flickered open, but for a moment he stayed completely still in his bed, lying on his back with his head resting on the pillow.
It felt strange. I was about to read one murder mystery while sitting inside another.
It was the reference to Down’s syndrome that most upset him. Mary described it as an ‘awful sickness’. It wasn’t. It was a condition, not an illness. What sort of woman could see it as a threat to her own bloodline? Had she really pulled up the drawbridge on her son’s marriage simply to protect future grandchildren from.
I thought most kids would give their right arm to go into outer space,” Shulsky added unhelpfully. “Haven’t you ever dreamt about becoming an astronaut?” “No,” Alex said. “I always wanted to be a train driver.
But there have been times when I have been very much in the shadows, when I have looked into the valley of death and wished – and wished I could enter.
It’s none of my business, but sometimes you can spend so much time chasing something that you lose everything else while you’re about it.
We need our literary heroes. Life is dark and complicated but they shine out. They’re the beacons that we follow.
That’s the thing about funerals. They’re completely hypocritical. Everyone says how wonderful the deceased was, how kind, how generous when, deep down, they know it’s not true.
I would kill myself tomorrow and I would except for the one brightness in my life, the one dawn that gives me hope.