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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Conversations are always dangerous if you have something to hide.
“You’re too nice, Nicky. You always think too well of people. People take advantage, you know.”
“A bit . . . a little sad, maybe. Like they’re not where they should be. Misplaced.
He is like fire, and being here—in the Mystery House, a staircase away from him—is like passing your hand through flame. The thrill of contact with a dangerous substance.
my mind is like a crowded box-room with packets of all sorts stowed away therein, so many that I may well have but a vague perception of what was there.’”
“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.”
“there is one pursuit, and one alone, that engages a man who has lost his wife and son in a single night, and that is resisting the almighty urge to blow his brains out.”
Man is the most dangerous animal of all,’
“People your age—young people, I mean—you treat your lives like galleries, for public display, open to all. My life is no gallery. It’s a vault, a black box, and—I’m sorry I can’t put this more elegantly—it’s nobody’s damn business.”
“A man finds himself saying what he hadn’t meant to say. That’s a gift. And a weapon.”
“As Simon St. John tells us, the past is a poison. Tolerable only in trace amounts.”
“The past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting.”
“I think it’s good to learn to live with fear,” he said. “Fear and failure. And the unknown.”
Women, he adds, make better crime writers than men; “I think it’s because every day they must contend with sinister forces.” Nicky answers unintelligibly. Sebastian speaks again: “Men.”
“‘A woman who doesn’t lie,’” she replies, “‘is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.’”
“Life is loss,” says Diana, very softly. After a moment, Nicky shrugs. “Life is change. And—discovery.”
“I don’t think it’s true that bullies always hate themselves, or that they necessarily hurt others because they’re insecure. Some Aspens genuinely believe they’re special, they’re better.
‘It belongs to human nature to hate him whom you have harmed.’” She opens her eyes again, finds her teacup. “We hate those we hurt.”
“I don’t think I can imagine wanting to die,” she says, slowly. “But I guess I can imagine not wanting to live.”
‘When we parted she was a free woman, but I was not a free man.’”
“Grief might feel like fear, but it also feels like memory, and with memory, there’s no—a story doesn’t end.”
It’s human nature . . . ,’” she recites slowly. “‘. . . to hate him whom you have hurt.’”
