Conviction Quotes
"A good podcast can add a glorious multi-world texture to anything."
"I loved getting up before everyone else, when the house was still and I could read or listen to a podcast alone in a frozen world."
"Trust issues, the couples counsellor called it."
"I wish I had lingered longer. I would never see them so innocent again."
"Hamish was very proud of his background. He knew nothing at all about mine."
"I deliberately picked an older man with money and status."
"I tried to reassure Hamish, I’m not planning to kill you or anything. But that was not reassuring, apparently."
"The house was bought by Hamish’s great-grandfather in 1869. He bought it new from Greek Thompson."
"I’ve resisted an Assyrian invasion while picking up dry-cleaning. I’ve seen justice served on a vicious murderer while buying underpants."
"Then we talked about that for a while. It was a stupid process. We were both hostile and sad. Our relationship was in its death throes."
"I didn’t want to listen on but I needed to know what had happened to him."
"Grief is a scar. The tissue is tough and when it’s cut again, it heals poorly."
"I wasn’t going to be that Mum. I mean, I can do passive as a party trick but I will not raise girls to it."
"I was sitting on the side of the bath, wishing I was dead. Hamish was leaving me. He was taking my girls."
"I watched them drive off in the airport cab. I was on the top step outside the front door, weeping with fury and impotence."
"Pity is a hollow virtue. I like it. It’s a form of self-aggrandisement really, bigging yourself up by defining someone as below you."
"I begged him not to take the girls. ‘I can’t stand to be away from them. A week is too long. I’ll die.’"
"I have a scar across my eyebrow that is pretty distinctive. I’m recognisable if you know what to look for."
"It’s an odd out-of-the-way place for odd out-of-the-way people, often incomers pretending to be Scottish."
"I’m making this sound eventful. I’m making it ridiculous and action-packed. It wasn’t like that. It was just humiliating and sad."
"I was there for a very long time, afraid to stand in case my feet took me to the cellar."
"I had vacillated about whether or not it was my Leon Parker, but I didn’t doubt this was my Gretchen."
"I was there for a long while, hours anyway, but it was hard to gauge time, it was sliding around like a puppy on a greasy floor."
"Seafarers are superstitious. They are always looking to divine the future by looking at signs and patterns in the past."
"Superstitions give people a sense of control."
"None of us knows the history of any other private yachts and maybe these are common events in the lives of extraordinary people."
"Human beings are programmed to find patterns, to make sense of random events."
"The eternal companions of all clever women are mistrust and scorn."
"The kindest is that Amila’s story was so beguiling and unfolded so pleasingly that the French police couldn’t resist it."
"This crime could only have been committed by someone on board."
"When a narrative chimes with pre-existing beliefs, it can seem so self-evidently true that all conflicting evidence is discarded."
"Every generation thinks the world will end with them. Whether it’s the Black Death, Judgement Day, or nuclear war, humans have a hard time imagining a world going on after their death."
"If Otto made his face cream shockingly expensive then people would buy it as a status symbol. They weren’t really buying cream. They were buying exclusivity."
"Soldiers begin fighting for a cause and finish fighting for their comrades."
"The super-rich are surrounded by flies. They attract predators. It is both a hazard of being very rich and what motivates others to get very rich."
"We don’t tell our stories because, if we’ve survived, that can only mean that what happened wasn’t so very bad after all. It never means that we are fucking amazing."
"You try not to slander or insult but you can’t get it wrong by accident with scary rich bastards and just apologize. It doesn’t work like that."
"People forget that you’re a person. It’s just the deal."
"Sometimes being a mother isn’t quite what you think it’s going to be."
"It’s just the deal. I was so young when we got famous, I wouldn’t have consented if I’d known what it would be like but it’s done now. I sold my face for a pittance."
"You have to understand, she had a difficult time with me, with Leon, you know. She got in trouble sometimes but I was so crazy."
"Nothing but dirt floors, skinny little kids, hungry half the time, running around, no one looking after them."
"The first glimmer of hope I’d had in a long time."
"It’s relative. Nothing but dirt floors, skinny little kids, hungry half the time, running around, no one looking after them."
"The kids in the village they were all together."
"Demy and Yergey, same age. Both had no fathers."
"Yergey is a crazy man. He will do anything, very impulsive."
"The police tell him, we will let you go, Yergey, OK?"
"He’s saying, OK, take me in, but make sure Mama gets that iPad!"
"She was preparing to have people believe her low, the constancy of her love."
"I don’t honestly know how we ended up in a hotel as expensive as that."
"This club had rules. So, these men, clever men, brave men, handsome men."
"It’s hard to be alive sometimes. Don’t you find it hard?"
"A doctor with a portable brain scanner and two technicians had examined me."