The Lost Notebook Quotes
"It’s probably fine, Mila told herself. Ani is almost certainly perfectly fine."
"It wasn’t fair that the responsibility had ended up on Mila’s shoulders; so much responsibility that she felt consumed by it."
"She didn’t need a response. If Ani’s mother, Sophie, was still alive, she would have been happy for Ani to be with JP because Sophie assumed things would turn out well even when they blatantly wouldn’t."
"Earlier, a long time earlier, at breakfast that morning, Ani had told Mila she was going to her friend, Pernille Sohar’s house after school."
"She checked the phone again, nothing, crossed her arms, and paced the length of the garden."
"Ani’s face was small, her eyes swollen. ‘You should have called me,’ Mila said, more gently. ‘I was so worried about you.’"
"‘It’s happening!’ Ani said. ‘What is?’ ‘Can I borrow your phone? I need to call Pernille. I need to warn her!’"
"‘It’s just the one job,’ said Ceci. ‘To help Mrs Perry.’"
"‘I shouldn’t be having to do this,’ Mila said to Sophie’s grave. ‘Why did you have to go out that day, Sophie?’"
"‘She was always inclined to be reckless,’ said Ceci."
"‘I can’t believe it,’ Carter said again. ‘Jesus, Ceci, I’m so sorry. If I’d had any idea…’"
"Why did you let Charlie take you out in that stupid boat when bad weather was forecast? Were you drunk? Was it a dare? Why did you do it?"
"I think it’s great. And Harry’s going to love it here when he visits."
"I always try to see the best in people, but some of these people... Some of them, I look as hard as I can, Mila. I find reasons for them being the way they are because most of the time there are reasons. But some of them, it's hard finding anything good."
"If you want to work in archaeology, the most important attribute you need is patience, and a willingness to be disappointed."
"You’ll never be one of the locals, Mila, if you insist on coming into Morannez at this time of day."
"The only person who could have made those posters and put them up is Mrs. Perry herself. Unless her computer has been compromised, or her email address hacked, which of course is possible. But if that’s the case, Toussaint’s can’t be blamed."
"It's okay, Mila. We've been through worse than this and we have survived. Let's calm down and try to work out what's going on here."
"I would have bet my bottom dollar that she wasn’t the kind of woman to do such a thing!"
"Despite her bravado, she was flailing and Mila, who had been absolutely determined that she wasn’t going to get involved, found herself relenting."
"She and her husband need to sit down and talk."
"My daughter is here. My fourteen-year-old daughter. Can you imagine how she’s feeling now?"
"We, Toussaint’s, was just the weapon used to get at the Perrys."
"It’s absolutely understandable that you’re distressed."
"People know you, Ceci. They know you’re an honest businesswoman and an ethical one."
"The truth won’t make any difference. People will say there’s no smoke without fire."
"That’s not the same woman who came to see me at the office."
"Don’t contact me again. I’m going to telephone our solicitor."
"Why would she deny it? Does she have amnesia or something?"
"It was a stupid, overtired, paranoid thought."
"Sophie preferred swallows because they were small, fast, and delightful."
"The truth is often as bad or worse than the hurt it brings."
"No organisation wants to be associated with an alleged pervert."
"I wish you wouldn’t do that, darling. The roads are filthy."
"The professor had been asked to make her stay away."
"We’re tourists, remember? We can do whatever you like in whatever order you like!"
"I should have pushed him but he looked so tired."
"She’s dead to me now. If people ask, I say I only have one child."
"I don’t think Carter was offended by my refusal."
"It’s only carbon emissions, bringing about the end of the world."
"She was sitting cross-legged on the bed beneath the poster."
"A beautiful summer, people were saying, record-breaking, as if that were a good thing."
"He transferred £20k out of his account on Saturday."
"Everything changed so quickly. You never knew when something that you’d assumed would be the same forever would change into something else."
"You can’t rely on anything except the moment in which you are living right now."
"Grieving is hard, isn’t it. It’s not easy for anyone. It’s not as if any of us is ever given lessons in how to let go of someone we love."
"Superficially, everything about the dig looked pretty much as it had done before."
"Wasn’t all of life worth living to the full, even those stages that were destined to be temporary?"
"If you didn’t seize the moment, then it would disappear and it could never be brought back."
"The heart wasn’t like a gift that could be handed from person to person; it had its own desires."
"We shared lots of good times, Sophie and me. I promise you we’ll only do something she’d approve of."
"The best way to help your family right now is to stay out of the way of the investigators so they can concentrate on their work."
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"I did not set out to humiliate these men, but rather to make them acknowledge the truth about what they had done."
"A man can pretend to be someone else, but even if he fools the rest of the world, his heart knows the truth."
"I held the gun but I never fired a shot. I didn’t kill anyone! If I’d refused to go along with what Dragan wanted, they’d have killed me too."
"The families and friends of the missing boys searched high and low but they didn’t find any bodies because their killers had dragged them out of the quarry, one by one, and thrown them into a deep ravine."
"You saw the mothers of the murdered boys, their sisters and brothers, their grandparents brought down by grief, and you said nothing?"
"Giving a man who’s lived a blameless life a compelling reason to kill himself so that people would believe he had killed himself took some doing."
"I didn’t want to do it," Janko said, his lovely Danish wife watching stony-eyed from the observation gallery in the courtroom.
"But you never told anyone what had happened."