The Silkworm Quotes
"What dost thou feed on?" "Broken sleep." - Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier
"Every birth was, viewed properly, mere chance."
"There’s nothing of so infinite vexation as man’s own thoughts." - John Webster, The White Devil
"How long must we fight? for I cannot stay, nor will not stay! I have business." - Francis Beaumont and Philip Massinger, The Little French Lawyer
"Oh, Mr Tattle, every thing is safe with you, we know." - William Congreve, Love for Love
"Well, ’tis a rare thing to have an ingenious friend…" - William Congreve, The Double-Dealer
"Quine's in the so-bad-he's-good category these days – we could’ve done something offbeat with the marketing."
"He’s the most monumentally arrogant, deluded bastard I’ve ever met."
"What’s in the—? Never mind – it’s just stuff in the book."
"If you tell the truth in a grotesque way – not that I’m suggesting that the stuff he’s saying is true."
"They boil them alive, so that they don’t damage their cocoons by bursting out of them."
"He was virtually floating on air, absolutely elated."
"He’d never dream of depriving the world of the genius of Owen Quine."
"After all the bloody fuss we had when I wanted to invite Sarah Shadlock."
"But it’s hardly the same thing – Cormoran’s never tried to get me into bed."
"When she first saw me, I could swear she thought I was Quine."
"It’s on the invitation. Unusual. Where did that come from?"
"I was – well, I was conceived there, apparently."
"Why do people do this? Blog, you mean? I don’t know… didn’t someone once say the unexamined life isn’t worth living?"
"He’s worried about your mum, isn’t he? The mini-stroke?"
"I’ve tried to call it off and what can I say except The Heart has its reasons, which Reasons don’t know."
"They were often attractive and usually, as his very oldest friend Dave Polworth liked to put it, ‘total fucking flakes’."
"The burden of Owen’s song is that I’m gratuitously brutal to his masterpieces."
"I think he’s having a breakdown. The subtext, under all the usual grotesquerie, is: everyone’s against me, everyone’s out to get me, everyone hates me."
"Nobody else seems to think that Quine didn’t know exactly what he was doing."
"Do the job and do it well had been his creed then and now."
"While we boast the best writers in the world, Roper Chard will continue to excite, to challenge and to entertain."
"She comes from money and makes it clear that she married down with Jerry."
"Well, I certainly never expected to find myself here, but it feels like a homecoming."
"I was an angry young man and now I’m an angry old man."
"In his professional capacity, he had viewed bodies that had been dragged into positions intended to suggest suicide or accident."
"Inactivity after such a discovery was hateful to him."
"Alone in a room hardly bigger than the average office’s stationery cupboard, his thoughts stuck like flies to the rotting obscenity he had found in the artist’s studio."
"Worst to contemplate was the order in which acid had been poured, the body disemboweled."
"If they thought they were inconveniencing him, they were wrong."
"However, in solving the Lula Landry case, Strike might be said to have humiliated the Met."
"His birthday whisky sat beside him in its carrier bag."
"He thought that if they kept him here much longer he might break it open."
"Strike had met Timothy Cormoran Anstis a handful of times and had not been impressed in his favor."
"Strike’s allegiance this afternoon had been to the desecrated remains of Owen Quine, to stand watch over them until he had delivered them safely into the hands of the police."
"I think we can be sure he was killed in that room."
"Only her word for it that 'I know where you’re going' meant this writer’s retreat and not the house on Talgarth Road."
"All well bred persons lie – Besides, you are a woman; you must never speak what you think…"
"Strike’s dreams that night, fuelled by a day’s consumption of Doom Bar, by talk of blood, acid and blowflies, were strange and ugly."
"Winter had slid in the night like a glacier over London."
"He knew, now, as clearly as though he had spent the night puzzling it out, how Helly Anstis knew Charlotte’s wedding plans."
"The shower water took longer than usual to heat up; he cranked up the thermostat, fearing burst pipes and frozen gutters, sub-zero living quarters and an expensive plumber."
"The sleet was sliding wetly down their windows."
"Now, on this cold winter’s morning, sitting in his office with her picture in the bin beside him, Strike found himself craving orders, a case abroad, an enforced sojourn on another continent."
"He had never managed to stop him putting on his uniform, never prevented his return to work, never succeeded in forcing him away from an investigation."
"In such slippery ice-pavements men had need to be frost-nail’d well, they may break their necks else."
"Strike’s gaze slid along the row of black-and-white megastars on the wall facing him."
"Welcome to my world," said Strike, who had withdrawn his arm from around her shoulders the instant they had stopped.
"The Albion’s interior was as cosy as its exterior suggested."
"But the weather was bad and his knee excruciating; Strike could not muster any guilt."
"They sat in silence while Robin reflected wryly that Strike’s dislike of Anstis’s theories might be due to innate competitiveness more than any objective evaluation."
"You know, there's pride, and then there's stupidity."
"I believe in freedom of speech, up to and including upsetting people."
"You cannot imagine the crap I am sent, day in, day out."
"The few times when I felt that Owen was morally in the clear."
"Owen was an overgrown child, which could make him unbearable or charming."
"She was going to marry him and she was going to marry him."
"We need readers," muttered Daniel Chard. "More readers. Fewer writers."
"Disloyalty," said Chard suddenly, "cuts at me like nothing else."
"Danger, the spur of all great minds." - George Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy d'Ambois
"Rise my good angel, Whose holy tunes beat from me that evil spirit Which jogs mine elbow…" - Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier
"Be kind, Robin implored herself, even though it was true."
"Till death do us part... and her thoughts drifted again: she and Matthew, tied together forever until they died... no, not tied... don't think tied... What's wrong with you?"
"I've missed you," Matthew said. "It's been horrible without you."
"But you could have put up with it for a night, she told herself sternly. It felt like an undeserved escape."
"Love is a mirage," said Michael Fancourt on the television screen. "A mirage, a chimera, a delusion."
"We don't love each other; we love the idea we have of each other. Very few humans understand this or can bear to contemplate it. They have blind faith in their own powers of creation. All love, ultimately, is self-love."
"Detectives make shit dates," he told her as he sat down.
"We are all liable to mistakes, sir; if you own it to be so, there needs no farther apology."
"Mr. Scandal, I shall be very glad to confer with you about these things which he has uttered - his sayings are very mysterious and hieroglyphical."
"I drink because I'm fucking married to you, that's why!"
"I am so well acquainted with despair, I know not how to hope."
"If Mr Graham Greene was correct, and the writer needs a chip of ice in his heart, then Michael Fancourt surely has what it takes in abundance."
"She's happy there. She has an enviable capacity for enjoying the familiar."
"Like most writers, I tend to find out what I feel on a subject by writing about it. It is how we interpret the world, how we make sense of it."
"Art is supposed to provoke: by that standard alone, Bombyx Mori has more than fulfilled its remit."
"But why shouldn't it be published?... Yes, why not?"
"It is hard to throw off long-established love: Hard, but this you must manage somehow..."
"You can't plot murder like a novel. There are always loose ends in real life."
"If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill."
"It's my profession. Would anyone ask you whether you were still in the army while you were having private difficulties?"
"The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them."
"So that's how you crept up on me, an acid eating away my guts, stole from me everything I most treasure?"
"I didn't 'lose' her. On the contrary, I tripped over her in the dark, dead in our kitchen with her head in the oven."
"Nearly everyone does these days. The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them."
"Writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill."
"Make yourself at home as much as you can without being rude, make it harder for her to dislodge you."
"Ropes and a burqa! Got more than he bargained for, didn’t he?"
"She gave it me! I was being nice, taking her crappy bloody picture and acting like it was good – I was being nice!"
"Once you’ve laid it out for her, act like you can take it or leave it."
"No woman who had been with Owen Quine for two years was going to believe that publicity wasn’t an unqualified boon."
"Dangers, like stars, in dark attempts best shine." - Thomas Dekker, The Noble Spanish Soldier
"How say you, Endymion, all this was for love? I say, madam, then the gods send me a woman’s hate." - John Lyly, Endymion: or, the Man in the Moon
"Most women would’ve expected flowers. I’m not most women."