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Kindle Notes & Highlights
He had an odd double impression of being exactly where he belonged, and where he’d never belonged, of intense familiarity and of separateness.
Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.
‘You can only carry a weight and use your hands, if you strap the weight to your back. Marry, and you get the use of your hands back. Don’t marry, and you’ll never have your hands free for anything else.
bonhomie.
Useful life lesson, I’d have thought, realizing you aren’t owed. You don’t get stuff automatically because of who you’re related to.
“In essence, we tend to sort each other and ourselves into groupings, and that usually leads to an overestimation of similarities between members of a group, and an underestimation of the similarities between insiders and outsiders.”
In the immediate aftermath of the explosion that had taken Strike’s foot and shin, not to mention the lower half of Sergeant Gary Topley’s body and a chunk of Richard Anstis’s face, Strike had felt a variety of emotions which included guilt, gratitude, confusion, fear, rage, resentment and loneliness, but he couldn’t remember feeling lucky. “Lucky” would have been the bomb not detonating. “Lucky” would have meant still having both his legs. “Lucky” was what people who couldn’t bear to contemplate horrors needed to hear maimed and terrorized survivors call themselves.
Not for Creed the belief in signs and symbols, a secret language decipherable only by initiates, a refuge in mystery or magic.
When you’re living a lie, nothing’s more threatening than people who tell the truth…
‘We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.’
The word “Broadmoor” had long since lost all bucolic associations in the collective mind of the British public, and Strike was no exception to this rule.
He’d interviewed plenty of suspects in his career; the skill lay in making it easier for a suspect to disclose the truth than to continue lying. Some were worn down by patient questioning, others resistant to all but intense pressure, still others yearned to unburden themselves, and the interrogator’s methods had to change accordingly.
He scores very highly on the dark triad: narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy. Devious, sadistic, unrepentant and extremely egotistical.”
