When Will There Be Good News? Quotes
"The heat rising up from the tarmac seemed to get trapped between the thick hedges that towered above their heads like battlements."
"You smell of soot, their father said to their mother. And cabbage and milk. And you smell of failure, their mother said."
"The argument about who smelled of what wasn’t over, apparently, because their mother picked up a blue-and-white-striped jug from the dresser and threw it at their father."
"The first thing their father did when they moved to Devon was to buy six red hens and a hive full of bees."
"It would have been better to have tried to save the baby and been killed than not trying and living."
"The last time he had come here to scope out the village, it had been a Sunday afternoon, height of the midsummer season."
"He had driven the rental from the station. He would have driven all the way (in his flashy car), but when he had got into the driving seat and switched on the engine, he found his car was completely dead."
"Reggie spooned some kind of vegetable mush into the baby’s mouth. It was just as well the baby was strapped into his high chair, because every so often he would suddenly fling out his arms and legs and try to launch himself into the air like a suicidal starfish."
"Flowers didn’t get their flowers from gardens, they got them from greenhouses in Holland. And Kenya."
"Orthopedics is just hammers and chisels, really, a superior form of joinery."
"If her own child died, Louise wouldn’t keep on going, she would take herself out, something nice and neat."
"Life’s random. The best you can do is pick up the pieces."
"She was a woman, so, technically speaking, she could do anything."
"There’s nothing concrete to link Hunter to any of the Glaswegian guys."
"Why not just put a big flashing neon sign on the roof saying, 'If you’re looking for Alison Needler, David, she’s right here.'"
"I have to tell you that Andrew Decker has been released from prison."
"Multi Agency Public Protection Arrangements, bit of a mouthful, eh?"
"‘Little Girl Lost.’ That’s what I was in the evening papers."
"If you were on your own, you could fight, if you were on your own, you could run. You couldn’t do either when you were with children."
"The first Mrs. de Winter, Samantha, had been the green-thumbed type."
"A long time ago, a long, long time ago, when the world was much younger and so was Jackson, he had his blood group tattooed on his chest, just above his heart."
"Jackson himself had stuck with the one practical, lowercase message — 'blood type A positive,' until now no more than a faded-blue souvenir of another life."
"We thought we’d got the artery, but you just kept pumping it out."
"Jackson didn’t really want to be treated by a doctor who looked like Harry Potter, but he wasn’t in a position to argue."
"Fuzzy," Jackson said. It was definitely his favorite word."
"Who am I?" he asked. He sounded like an amateur philosopher, but it wasn’t a metaphysical question."
"His ulnar artery had been partially severed, leading to 'profuse and rapid bleeding,' the Potter look-alike said."
"I died," he said to a new doctor. "Briefly," she said dismissively, as if you had to be dead a lot longer to impress her."
"He slept. That’s what he did. He was the sleeper. He slept for years."
"He couldn’t remember what the word meant. Nothing to do with cars, he supposed."
"This is where you live?" Inspector Monroe said, peering through the windscreen at Ms. MacDonald’s house."
"And then nothing. Time that was lost forever in some terrible dark chasm of the brain that Joanna never wanted to descend into again."
"She had a pain in her chest, an ache, sharp and sore. Her heart was thudding. Knock, knock, knocking."
"She put a finger on his lips and said, 'Shh. You had me at fuzzy.'"
"She was cheerful, optimistic, and sweet. She was funny, even comical sometimes, and much smarter than he was."
"You’ve just got a case of the screaming heebie-jeebies. Breathe, it always helps."
"Nothing to be ashamed of, it’s like a badge of courage."
"A coincidence is just an explanation waiting to happen."
"When the going gets tough, the tough take drugs."
"A dog person, are you? They’re everything people should be."
"You never had a full set of parents, I often wondered what it would be like."
"Just because something bad happened to her once doesn’t mean it won’t happen again."
"Do you want your seat back? No, you’re all right, I’m happy back here with the dog."