The Nothing Man Quotes

“These are no dark magicians. They have no special skills. People seem to forget that we know their names because they got caught. In fact, the only remarkable thing about them is what they took from the world: their victims. It’s their names we should know.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“You bought me a ticket to a planet where I lived by myself.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“When you find him, you’ll probably be shocked at just how much of nothing he really is.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Fiction only really worked if it was built like a lattice through which you were repeatedly offered glimpses of absolute truth.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Even if you were already falling, you were technically okay until you hit the ground.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“When you’re twelve years old, adult life seems like an endless adventure – or rather, your adult life feels like it will be.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“There was an especially acute heartbreak in having secured the job you’d dreamed of having for more than half your life only to discover that, firstly, it was nothing like you’d imagined it would be and then that, secondly, it had never really been your dream job at all.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Corruption plagued the force just as it did every other area of society. If it was noticed, it took a brave and principled member to report it, but it did happen.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“They had found an outlet, a remedy, an antidote. It was the only explanation.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“All of Jim’s work, his caution, his skills, his planning, his genius – it was all being undone by two overgrown children. How fucking infuriating.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Women were clearly the common denominator. His first three attacks focused on a woman and there was no attack that didn’t include one.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“But here’s the kicker: people don’t just read true-crime books now, they study them. They go looking for more. They listen to podcasts and meet up at conventions and trade theories’ – Bernadette mimed typing on a computer keyboard – ‘online until all hours of the night. Armies of armchair sleuths.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Jim opened the book. Its spine cracked loudly, like a bone.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“I didn’t want to go but I had no choice in the matter. I was too young and too numb to recall the journey, leaving me utterly lost, disoriented, and unable to find my way back. I’m still here. Until recently, I had resigned myself to the fact that I would be forever. But something unexpected has happened. A visitor has arrived and he knows the way back. He says he’ll take me with him. We leave soon. I’m finally getting to go home.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“and that you couldn’t go there without meeting someone you knew or someone who knew you.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“That room was an airlock between my life as I knew it and my life as I feared it would be from now on.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“A hugely disproportionate amount of it, which thrusts investigations into the spotlight from the get-go, which in turn amps up the pressure on police to make progress, fast.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“When I told people this, I invariably got the same reaction: disgust. Staying in the house where my family were slaughtered? What kind of sicko would want to do that?”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Almost as soon as he was on the job, Healy began a slide into bleak disillusionment. He found himself in an organisation bloated by bureaucracy and infected with levels of laziness and corruption that, in his eyes, it had no feasible way to recover from.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“Sometimes he wished he’d put more effort into cultivating friends or hobbies, or even just pretending to, so that he could announce he was off on a golf weekend or going out for a couple of hours to meet someone for coffee. But he hadn’t, and it was too late now. He’d never expected there to be a need for it, not at this hour of his life.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“San Francisco could lay claim to the highest rate of vehicle break-ins and burglaries in the whole of the United States. Now here she was in a little Irish country town where the word crime only had to stretch to cover incidents of public drunkenness and drink-driving, and she was being raped by a masked man in her own bed.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“The Nothing Man was back in the news and bringing a different kind of enthusiast to Covent Court: the true-crime tourist.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“bought me a ticket to a planet where I had to live by myself.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man

“You open your door one evening to find a uniformed police officer standing outside. Nothing’s wrong, don’t worry. This is just a courtesy call. There’s been a burglary in the area and they’re just letting you know so your home isn’t next. Lock your doors and windows. Keep valuables out of view. Think about installing an alarm. You chat for a few minutes. You might mention the door at the back that doesn’t lock. Or that fact that you live here alone. Or that the couple who owns this construction site is living here while the work goes on—or, well, one of them is, because her husband is going back to San Francisco for a few weeks next week. Maybe you don’t reveal any information, but while you speak he’s still gathering it. The integrity of the front-door lock. The layout of the ground floor. Whether or not he likes the look of you. If he’d like to do to you what he’s already done to the others. That’s how he was choosing them, we felt sure. Donning a Garda uniform and doing door-to-door calls in the aftermath of a real burglary. But was he really a guard? Neither Tom nor Johnnie could remember seeing a Garda car, and we thought it would be relatively easy to convince a member of the public that you were wearing a Garda uniform when in actual fact you were wearing an approximation of one. He could’ve also easily gotten hold of a real uniform—if he was prepared to murder innocent people, he was probably willing to steal items of clothing too. Moreover this behavior would have been an incredible risk for a serving member to take, when one phone call to the local station would’ve been all it took to bring his little rogue scouting missions crashing down.”
― Catherine Ryan Howard, The Nothing Man