Pride is a sweetmeat, to be savoured in small pieces; it makes for a poor feast.
Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery.
I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Goulds wife when I was researching The Moor, and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.
When you’re putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits.
Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.
Libraries made me – as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being.
The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets call the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images.
Eccentricty had flowered into madness.
I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there’s no knowing what one mightn’t do.
Why the devil was my husband positively grinning – and with what looked remarkably like relief?
Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.
Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind.
However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the “Eureka!” comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.
The last dog I had was an Irish wolfhound – now that is a dog. Rather spoils a person for a lesser canine, that is, anything under a hundredweight.
He said nothing. Very sarcastically.
I was merely going to say that I hope you realise that guilt is a poor foundation for a life, without other motivations beside it.
Guessing is a weakness brought on by indolence and should never be confused with intuition.
The house was still, weighty with the comfort of a thousand books.
I did not think of myself as a detective; I was a student of theology, and I was to spend my life in exploration, not of the darker crannies of human misbehaviour, but of the heights of human speculation concerning the nature of the Divine. That the two were not unrelated did not occur to me for years.
I could never, I knew then, lose myself “in love.” Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love.