More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Suicides, in his experience, were perfectly capable of feigning an interest in a future they had no intention of inhabiting.
But the lies she told were woven into the fabric of her being, her life; so that to live with her and love her was to become slowly enmeshed by them,
Laymen, in Strike’s experience, were obsessed with motive: opportunity topped the professional’s list.
when the first crashing wave of mutual longing subsided, the ugly wreck of the past lay revealed again, its shadow lying darkly over everything they tried to rebuild.
Strike was used to playing archaeologist among the ruins of people’s traumatized memories;
As the day wore on, it jeered at him for his self-imposed habit of smoking outside in the street, as though he were still in the army, as though this petty self-discipline could impose form and order on the amorphous, disastrous present.
Maybe one day it will be cheering even to remember these things. Virgil, Aeneid, Book 1
When, Strike wondered, would he next enjoy a pint on a Friday with friends? The notion seemed to belong to a different universe, a life left behind.
the fact that he was a few pressed buttons away from speaking to her seemed too fragile a barricade against temptation,
How easy it was to capitalize on a person’s own bent for self-destruction; how simple to nudge them into non-being, then to stand back and shrug and agree that it had been the inevitable result of a chaotic, catastrophic life.
She invited pity, but he found he could not pity her even as much as, perhaps, she deserved. She lay dying, wrapped in invisible robes of martyrdom, presenting her helplessness and passivity to him like adornments, and his dominant feeling was distaste.
