The Chalk Pit Quotes

“Libraries are the cathedrals of the modern age. All that knowledge, available for anyone to use. It’s quite a subversive thought.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“Does the world really need another long essay on environmental archaeology and freshwater mollusks? Well, it's going to get one, whether it likes it or not.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“Ruth isn’t going to be bossed about by a woman in tight trousers who thinks she’s Helen Mirren playing Jane Tennison. She”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“She’s unmarried but, as she confided early on to Judy, ‘not short of offers’. Nelson often thinks that Jo is not nearly as attractive as she thinks she is but, as with all these things, her insane self-belief rubs off on others, and after a week King’s Lynn police were treating her as if she were Helen of Troy. Her technique is divide and rule.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“We’ll have to see if CSI picked up anything from the scene,’ says Nelson. ‘Are they finished?’ ‘Yes,’ says Tanya. ‘Shall I liaise with them?’ Tanya loves liaising, it sounds so much more important than keeping in touch. ‘If”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“her family liaison training who would be contacting”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“His mind isn't reacting properly, plodding along the byways and cul-de-sacs because it can't face the traffic on the main highway. But when it comes to it, his life has once more become a straight road leading in one direction. Until death do us part.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“Back in her room, she takes one last look out of her window. The marsh whispers with a sudden breeze, an owl hoots and she hears another night bird answer. The liminal zone, that's what Erik used to call it–the bridge between life and death. This underground world described by Nelson seems another in-between place, a waiting area between life on earth and death in the grave. Why do we bury bodies underground? So they will rise again. Ruth pulls the curtains and gets into bed.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“It's a long shot but we can't leave any stone unturned. Cloughie, you get onto the number plate.'
It's an odd phrase, thinks Nelson, as he runs the CCTV footage one more time. He thinks of the tunnel that morning, the journey below the stones of the city. Nothing good ever comes of turning over a stone.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“It feels like a war sometimes, thinks Judy, looking around the room where the clients are sleeping, eating or just staring into space. The homeless are like the remnants of some long-forgotten army, still dressed in their ragged uniforms, reminding their more fortunate neighbors that there is a battlefield out there, a place of violence and fear and dread. This knowledge is hard to take sometimes; you can see it in the faces of people who cross the street to avoid someone begging. But is being made to feel uncomfortable enough reason to kill?”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“I’m talking about people who live in some of our most affluent cities,’ says O’Casey, ‘but they’re driven to live below the earth. People who—for whatever reason—aren’t welcome on the surface: homeless people, addicts, the HIV positive. There are subterranean communities all over the world, in catacombs, sewers and abandoned metros. The Tunnel People in Las Vegas, the Empire of the Dead in Paris, the Rat Tribe in Beijing. A lot of them are proper societies, with electricity and phone lines, even churches and restaurants sometimes. The Rat Tribe in Beijing are mostly migrant workers, some of them brought in to build for the Olympics. The only place they can afford to live is underground, in tunnels and old air-raid shelters.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“That does it. Ruth isn’t going to be bossed about by a woman in tight trousers who thinks she’s Helen Mirren playing Jane Tennison.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“He looks like a cross between Harry Potter and Dr Who (David Tennant era).”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“How can she sit there looking so clear-eyed and smooth-skinned when she was up drinking until the early hours last night? The young truly are a different species. Nowadays one extra pint in the pub can make Nelson feel rough as a dog the next day.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“She looks at them solemnly, glasses glinting. The man next to Nelson, who earlier introduced himself as a minicab driver called Steve, is apparently asleep. Nelson gave his name simply as Harry and didn’t vouchsafe an occupation”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“Jo decides her. ‘Stay here,’ she barks at Ruth. That does it. Ruth isn’t going to be bossed about by a woman in tight trousers who thinks she’s Helen Mirren playing Jane Tennison. She follows Jo through the broken doors into the lobby”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“There are subterranean communities all over the world, in catacombs, sewers and abandoned metros. The Tunnel People in Las Vegas, the Empire of the Dead in Paris, the Rat Tribe in Beijing.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“What’s worse, dying of radiation poisoning or being trapped thirty metres underground with a bunch of politicians?’ ‘Someone was telling me about billionaire bunkers the other day. Where the super-rich burrow down to escape nuclear war. Imagine crawling to the surface to find that the only other people to have survived are millionaire arms dealers. Them and the cockroaches.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“There’s an underground cathedral in South America, isn’t there?’ says Ruth. ‘I was reading about it recently. Isn’t it in an abandoned salt mine?’ ‘Yes, the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá,”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“text”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“It’s so thin, the line between respectability and chaos.”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit

“Yes. It’s been on the news a lot with that other hole”
― Elly Griffiths, The Chalk Pit