A Long Shadow Quotes

“I decided to become a policeman to speak for the dead. They have no one else, you see. Somewhere there’s always proof of what happened, some piece of evidence that will obtain a conviction. It’s important for the guilty to be brought to justice, I think. Without justice, there’s chaos.”
― Charles Todd, A Long Shadow

“Children were quick to grasp the subtleties of emotions around them, to see through evasions and quickly identify prevarication.”
― Charles Todd, A Long Shadow

“Revenge was personal as a rule. Otherwise it was pointless.”
― Charles Todd, A Long Shadow

“I lost my own daughter and I’ll never have another. The hurt doesn’t go away, no matter what you tell yourself. It’s there day and night. I’d have killed any man who touched her. Why should I stand for such talk about another man’s child, if I wouldn’t have stood for it about my own?”
― Charles Todd, A Long Shadow

“There’s a beauty in birds on the wing,
That stirs the heart and makes earthbound creatures
Long for flight, but the larks above the battlefield
Are silenced by the sounds of war.
I have watched birds out at sea,
Catching the wind,
And longed to follow them,
To some safe place far from here.”
― Charles Todd, A Long Shadow

“What of the hundreds of faceless men on the streets looking for work, trying to pick up the threads of family life, hoping that the dying had made a better Britain, and finding they were lost in it. Faceless men…People stepped around them now, ignored the brave boy who’d marched away to glory and now begged on the street because a one-armed man couldn’t work. He thought sometimes, in the dark corners of his mind, that the dead were the lucky ones. They hadn’t been disillusioned.”
― Charles Todd, A Long Shadow

“and left his bicycle well hidden behind the stone wall”
― Charles Todd, A Long Shadow