Death Of An Expert Witness Quotes
"It seldom had to ring more than once, but every time he dreaded that the peal might have woken Nell."
"He was paid well enough for his availability, but that wasn’t the only reason why he was so obsessively conscientious."
"The rich, loamy smell of the fen autumn night washed over his face, strong, yet fresh."
"The melancholy of the early hours took hold of him."
"Love, the lack of it, the growing need, the sudden terrifying hope of it, was only a burden."
"The rain had stopped and the sky was a tumult of gray clouds through which the moon, now almost full, reeled like a pale, demented ghost."
"I’m forty-five next week and what have I achieved?"
"The atmosphere of the house came up to her nostrils, sour as a stale thermos flask."
"The dead had nothing to be frightened of any more, and there was nothing to fear from them."
"The place was an arid scrubland between the two ends of the town, litter-strewn and edged with sparse trees above a ditch."
"The conventional sophistry was that the laboratory worked as a team harnessed by a common purpose."
"Few things were more demoralizing than to stand uselessly by while other men demonstrated their professional competence."
"You don’t want to let it worry you. You have to learn to be like a doctor or a nurse, detached, isn’t it?"
"The satisfaction of watching the emergence of an obscure watermark under soft X-rays never palled."
"Management is largely a matter of personal relationships."
"The fact that you can’t take criticism without becoming as personal and spiteful as a neurotic girl is an example of what I mean."
"I hadn’t realized that your family were noted for success in their personal relationships."
"I don’t pretend to like you, and I wouldn’t have served under you if the Home Office had been daft enough to appoint you Director of this lab."
"He was a pleasant, rather ordinary lad with two good A-levels and an unaccountable wish to become a forensic biologist."
"A forensic biologist who can’t work accurately under pressure is no use to me or the Service."
"I shall make it plain to Howarth that you and I can’t serve in the same lab."
"Personally I don’t care a damn whether you’re here or not. But just lay off bullying Bradley."
"The expense is exorbitant, the position ridiculous, and the pleasure transitory."
"Senior staff fighting each other. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves."
"The marriage, too, had been a miscalculation, but given the circumstances of the time, an understandable one."
"You knew what you were taking on when you married me."
"The reception desk is the heart of the laboratory."
"It’s a game, isn’t it? You win if you play by the rules."
"Murder is beastly, embarrassing, and inconvenient."
"Murder is always solved at a cost, sometimes to himself, more often to others."
"It’s not a question I’ve given much thought to. I got on all right with him."
"A criminal trial isn’t a tribunal for eliciting the truth."
"He was a perfectionist who didn’t suffer fools gladly."
"The universal instinct to cover up the recently dead."
"He said that it wasn’t any use telephoning late at night. He’d do it first thing in the morning before he went to work."
"He doesn’t go in for friends. We keep ourselves to ourselves."
"What else would he say? He wasn’t one for chatting over the telephone."
"He didn’t wake me. There’s a telephone extension in his room."
"But he never wakes me. He just leaves me a note and he’s usually back in time to bring me a cup of tea at seven o’clock."
"So I phoned the lab. I know the number of the Biology Department, of course."
"It doesn’t sound sense now, but it was something like that."
"His hands, with the long fingers like those of his son, but with their skin dry and stained as withered leaves, hung heavily between his knees."
"Time was, when he first went to college up in London, that we lost touch."
"A man might have space to think in this uncluttered sanctum."
"It was all here: the inability to accept that desire was no longer returned."
"Until you taught me that the answer was so simple."
"It looks as if he was one of those men who torment themselves trying to discover the meaning of existence."
"To maximize one’s pleasures and minimize one’s pain, yes, sir, I do."
"I realize that you won’t want to live in the fens."
"I don’t see what it’s got to do with Gerald."
"It’s all right. Really it is. It’s all right."
"If that’s meant to be a tactful way of finding out whether she had a motive for murder, you can ask her yourself."
"He never discussed his affairs with me and I didn’t discuss mine with him."
"It’s surprising, surely, that he should want to change a long-standing will without talking to you about it?"
"It had nothing to do with me. He owed me nothing, not even justice."
"No. I didn’t like him. I think I was even a little afraid of him."
"He was like a man psychologically burdened, unsure of his place in life."
"People who were really secure in their own personalities didn’t seem to notice or be bothered by it."
"They’ll tell you that the most destructive force in the world is hate. Don’t you believe it, lad. It’s love."
"He explained that scientists formulate theories about how the physical world works, and then test them out by experiments."
"Life is precious to nearly all of us. No one has a right to take it away from them."
"Human justice is imperfect, but it’s the only justice we have."
"This isolation of the spirit was not new to him; he had felt it before in the company of the recently dead."
"Her features, not yet settled in death, still bore the strain of life’s unquietude."
"The smell of mothballs came up to him, pungent as an anesthetic."
"It enshrined man, not God; reason, not mystery."
"O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength: before I go hence, and be no more seen."
"It was a place where certain reassuring rituals had been enacted, reaffirming its proprietor’s view of the proper order of the universe and his own place in that order."
"She laughed softly. 'Murdered Edwin? For the best and commonest of reasons, or so I’ve always read. Because she was once married to him.'"
"‘It looks like suicide, doesn’t it? I don’t suppose people kill themselves in the dark.'"
"Justice. A very dangerous concept, Miss Gray."
"It is only through learning to love that we find identity."