The Blackhouse Quotes

“But the one thing Fin had learned from his years in the police was that however much you believed you had them figured out, people invariably surprised you.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Life went past you in a flash, like a bus on a rainy night in Ness. You had to be sure it saw you and stopped to let you on, otherwise it was gone without you, and you would be left with a miserable walk home in the wind and the wet.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Knew, too, that it wasn’t just Mona he wanted to run away from. It was everything. Back to a place where life had once seemed simple. A return to childhood, back to the womb. How easy it was now to ignore the fact that he had spent most of his adult life avoiding just that. Easy to forget that as a teenager nothing had seemed more important to him than leaving.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“The trouble with jealous revenge is that while you might inflict hurt on the other party, it does nothing to lessen the effect of the hurt you are feeling yourself. So everyone ends up unhappy.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“It’s odd how people can get locked into a kind of time warp. There’s a time in their lives that defines them, and they hang on to it for all the subsequent decades; the same hair, the same style of clothes, the same music, even though the world around them has changed beyond recognition.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Tri rudan a thig gun iarraidh: an t-eagal, an t-eudach’s an gaol. (Three things that come without asking: fear, love and jealousy.)”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Maybe if he hadn’t devoted so much of his time to his God, he might have had more of it left for living.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Now he was learning again how easy it was to be lonely in a crowd.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Long stretches of empty road linked bleak and exposed settlements huddled around churches of various denominations. The Church of Scotland. The United Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland (Continuing)—the Wee Frees, as the free churches were universally known. Each one was a division of the one before. Each one a testimony to the inability of man to agree with man. Each one a rallying point for hatred and distrust of the other.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“It’s odd how people can get locked into a kind of time warp. There’s a time in their lives that defines them, and they hang on to it for all the subsequent decades; the same hair, the same style of clothes, the same music, even though the world around them has changed beyond recognition. My”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Eilidh, which to the non-Gaelic ear sounds like Ay-lay. It was the Gaelic for Helen.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Because tonight a secret had escaped and was moving amongst them like a ghost.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“But time never passes so quickly as when it is in short supply.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“La renuencia a expresar mis sentimientos, algo que me ha marcado durante toda mi vida.”
― Peter May, La isla de los cazadores de pájaros

“eager to explore all the possibilities he thought had been lost.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“now he was carrying a lot more weight, like his older brother, and his ginger hair”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“El problema con la venganza... es que, aunque sin duda puede causar dolor en la otra parte, no consigue curar las heridas que uno siente. Así que al final todos acaban siendo desgraciados.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“El problema con la venganza... es que, aunque sin duda puede causar dolor en la otra parte, no consigue curar las heridas que uno siente.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“There was about her the sense of a young woman, not yet middle-aged, who had simply stopped caring about herself. Stopped caring, too, about what others might think.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“And Mrs. Mackay gave me a right rollicking for not paying attention. That was my problem, she told me, I had no concentration. I was a dreamer. Plenty of ability, but no will to work. In truth, I had no will to do much of anything. I was like some sad, lovesick little puppy locked away on its own in a cupboard. It is strange, looking back, to remember how early I was afflicted by such emotions.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse