In The Woods Quotes
"The truth is the most desirable woman in the world and we are the most jealous lovers, reflexively denying anyone else the slightest glimpse of her."
"This is the only story in the world that nobody but me will ever be able to tell."
"Humans are feral and ruthless; this, this watching through cool intent eyes and delicately adjusting one factor or another till a man’s fundamental instinct for self-preservation cracks, is savagery in its most pure, most polished and most highly evolved form."
"Contrary to what you might assume, I did not become a detective on some quixotic quest to solve my childhood mystery."
"Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass."
"In ways too dark and crucial to be called metaphorical, I never left that wood."
"The very few people who know about the whole Knocknaree thing invariably suggest, sooner or later, that I should try hypnotic regression, but for some reason I find the idea distasteful."
"I don’t want to give the impression that my life was blighted by what happened at Knocknaree, that I drifted through twenty years as some kind of tragic figure with a haunted past."
"She was such a wonderful dancer… She had a place in the Royal Ballet School, you know. She would have been leaving in just a few weeks…"
"Katy and I were very close," Rosalind said, looking up at me. Her eyes were her mother's, big and blue, with that touch of a droop at the outer corners.
"I’m not going to get sick any more," Katy said.
Nobody’s accusing you of anything," Cassie said firmly, "but we have to be able to say we’ve explored and eliminated every possibility.
"I know answering these questions will be painful, but I promise you, Mr. Devlin, it would be even more painful to see this person acquitted because we didn’t ask them."
Yes, Jessica," Rosalind said softly. "Yes, Jessica, it’s real.
My relationship with Katy was great," he said. "She was a wonderful daughter and a wonderful girl, and I loved her.
"Sometimes, on evenings when only one studio was being used, she would ask if she could come in and practice in the other."
"The only things I believe in are out on that there dig."
"Religion exists to keep people in their place and paying into the collection plate."
"We all need to believe in something, right?"
"All this bio-yogurt virtue and financial self-righteousness are just filling the gap in the market."
"I had bent myself so fiercely to the idea of school as an eternal, inescapable fate that I had trouble imagining anything beyond it."
"Deep down, I think—a part of me couldn’t wait to see what would happen next."
"Everyone, I decided, should have a Sam around."
"I wanted to do nothing, absolutely nothing, for as long as possible, maybe for the rest of my life."
"I felt as if at any moment the bedsit might detach itself from the building like a luminous soap bubble and drift off into the night."
"I had discovered in myself a talent for a wonderful, unrepentant laziness, the kind most people never know after childhood."
"I gorged myself on books with a voluptuous, almost erotic gluttony."
"I loved the taut, steady absorption with which these men carefully disentangled threads and joined jigsaw pieces, until at last everything fell into place."
"I’m not sure why we came in. Jessica can’t be bothered to tell you what she saw, and you obviously don’t think that matters."
"She talks about reading unsuitable books from their library—The Golden Bough, Ovid’s Metamorphoses; Madame Bovary, which she hated but finished anyway—curled up in a window seat on the landing, eating apples from the garden, with soft rain going past the panes."
"Every lead I found ran me into a dead end; O’Kelly kept giving us rousing, arm-waving speeches about how we couldn’t afford to drop the ball on this one and when the going gets tough the tough get going."
"I thought of the underwater hush in the house the day Katy was found, Auntie Vera hovering in the hall."
"I wondered if there had been a moment, during that giggly girls’ night at Auntie Vera’s, when she had made some small, unnoticed sound."
"I sneaked a glance at his notes once, when he went to the bathroom and left them on his desk: diagrams and shorthand and little sketches in the margins, meticulous and indecipherable."
"I looked at the back of Jessica’s silky bent head and thought of those old stories where one twin is hurt and the other, miles away, feels the pain."
"We already had security footage of the night-bus guy in Supermac’s, dipping chips into barbecue sauce with the glacial concentration of the very drunk."
"'What?' Cassie asked, looking up from whatever she was doing."
"Kids can be beaten, raped, abused in any number of unthinkable ways, and still find it all but impossible to betray their parents by asking for help."
"At the last minute, when we had turned onto my old road and Cassie was parking the car, I wimped out of going to Peter’s house."
"'Shoo,' my mother said automatically, rapping the glass, and sighed."
"'Hello,' I said. 'Go away,' he told me, eventually and firmly."
"'Detective Robert Ryan,' I said, finding my ID. 'We’re investigating the death of Katharine Devlin.'"
"In the middle of the night, but I rang Cassie’s mobile anyway."
"I knew I needed to do something, before people started noticing that I was going to pieces."
"Losing a chunk of your memory is a tricky thing, a deep-sea quake triggering shifts and upheavals too far distant from the epicenter to be easily predictable."
"The girls I dream of are the gentle ones, wistful by high windows or singing sweet old songs at a piano, long hair drifting, tender as apple blossom."
"I had spent an awful lot of time at Peter’s house, and in some obscure way I felt his family was more likely to recognize me if I was unable to recognize them first."
"I’m just a simple small-town boy. I prefer to concentrate on the obvious."
"It’s like trying to make conversation with wallpaper."
"If I ever did break into your flat and rape you, I don’t think the charges would stick, do you?"
"It’s like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you’re supersensitized."
"I’ve never once touched any of them in any way that anyone could call wrong. Is that clear?"
"If we were all with the same girl, he said, it’d be the final seal on our friendship—like the blood-brothers thing, only stronger."
"It was like a nightmare, or a bad trip."
"God, did you see this thing on the Discovery Channel where they said up to five percent of the population are psychopaths?"
"I wish I had done everything he claimed I had."
"I’m really sorry about that, Mr. Mills."
"My dreams were uneasy ones, with a clogged, tainted quality to them."
"But I woke up in the morning with one image brilliantly clear in my head, slapped across the front of my mind like a neon sign."
"If he doesn’t, then we’ve made a bollocks of the whole thing."
"I felt as if everything that had happened throughout this case... had been sent by the hand of some wise kind god to bring me to this moment."
"It sounds facile, I’m sure. But I can’t begin to describe to you what it meant to me, this thousand-watt bulb clicking on above my head."
"I showered and shaved and gave Heather such a cheerful 'Good morning' that she looked taken aback and slightly suspicious."
"Sam’s eyes rounded in dismay for an instant; then the penny dropped. 'Feck the pair of ye,' he said happily."
"I’m no dancer, but she taught me the basic moves again and again... until suddenly they clicked into place and we were dancing."
"If you don’t turn that down at once, I shall call the police!" "We are the police!" Cassie yelled back.
"I felt as if the universe had turned upside down and we were falling softly into an enormous black bowl of stars and nocturne."
"When something was wrong we mostly went to the same place: the top room of the castle."
"I realized, suddenly, that the tree I was leaning against could be the very tree beside which I had been found."
"It had never once occurred to me that I might have been the hunted, all along."
"We sat there for a long time, until O’Gorman banged in and started shouting about something to do with rugby, and Sam quietly put the tape in his pocket and gathered up his things and left."
"Sam’s eyes snapped to me and then to the door, but there was no one there. 'Yeah,' he said, after a moment. 'It was.' His breathing was fast and shallow."
"I knew that I had just made at least one of the biggest mistakes of my life."
"I felt as if someone had been setting off a relentless series of depth charges inside my head."
"Sometimes, when you’re close to someone, you miss things. Other people can see them, but you can’t."
"Take, they replied, the oak and laurel. Take our fortune of tears and live like a spendthrift lover. All we ask is the one gift you cannot give."
"You shouldn’t have got yourself into this situation. I don’t think I should be expected to make allowances for your dishonesty."
"It's not just about me. What about Detective Ryan? He's never been rude to you, has he? He's mad about you."
"Well spotted. That’s because I’m not your mammy and this isn’t some little thing you can get out of by sulking."
"I said with syllables of clay. What gift, I asked, shall I bring now before I weep and walk away?"
"Don’t treat me as if I’m stupid. If you people had any evidence against me, I’d be under arrest, not standing here listening to you cry about Detective Ryan."
"If I decide I have a responsibility to tell your superiors about this, you won’t be able to bribe me into keeping quiet."
"The best detective in the world couldn’t have got anything coherent out of him at this point, and I knew I should have spotted this long before."
"She doesn’t deserve that. Any more than I did."
"What are you talking about? I’m just saying that I know this is your personal business, and you don’t have any reason to trust me with it."
"She’s lost her," said O’Kelly. "It’s the bloody caution that does it."
"Just a moment," Rosalind said coldly. "We’re not finished."
"I don’t like people trying to bully me, Detective."
"The arrogance of her," Sam said softly. "The fucking arrogance."
"Yes," Cassie said, very low. "I understand."
"So, as I was saying, I decided that someone needed to stop Katy from getting too full of herself."
"Jesus," Cassie said, barely above a whisper.
"She won’t," I said. "Not till she has her on murder."
"You’ll know when I tell you. And we’ll go in when I decide to go in."
"She just wanted to be a dancer," Cassie said quietly.
"And I had told her that wasn’t acceptable," Rosalind snapped.
"Cassie," I said, and held out my arms to her. "Oh, Cassie."
"Scratched me," Cassie said. Her voice was terrible, high and eerie.
"She’s not mad," she said. "Things aren’t true or false; they either suit her or they don’t."
"Inadmissible," she said. "Every fucking word."