A Tidy Ending Quotes

“the ridiculous thing is we’re so busy walking, we don’t take any notice of exactly what it is we’re walking towards and whether we really wanted to be walking in that direction in the first place.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“grief does that to you. It makes you either eat far too much or far too little, it makes you not sleep at all or sleep far too much, and it makes you either turn into someone who needs to be supported, or someone who will never need the support of anyone else ever again.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“I don’t understand being sectioned either. It feels like a punishment but no one can be bothered to tell you what it is you’re being punished for.’ ‘No one’s being punished, Linda. This isn’t a prison. You said yourself how much you like it here.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“certainly can’t ever remember finding something so hilarious I felt the need to throw my head back, but perhaps that’s because the world hasn’t really given me anything that amuses me enough to make me do it.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“I’d always wanted to paint my eyes like that, to make them tilt towards the sky in a state of constant curiosity, and I imagined Rebecca Finch drew them on herself all the time.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“when other people shovel fuel on your sense of self-loathing, eventually the only thing you can think to do is prove all of them right.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“Perhaps when something reaches a certain level of attractiveness, it has to let go of its ability to comfort you in order to make enough room for being so beautiful.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“It was only a few miles away, and people are always so much more interested if they think something might trespass into their own lives.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“We had the same discussions, the same unspoken rituals, lived through the same small machinery of our days, and the only fresh thing about it was that it was all played out to unfamiliar wallpaper.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“There are no letter boxes to shout through here, of course. No garden wall to stand on and no doorbell to ring. All the tiny details, all the quiet, unnoticed edges of the world have been taken away, and it’s only when they’re gone you realize how much you depended on them to make sense of everything else.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“windows. I told her to put some music on really loud and sing along with it so she can’t hear them. That’s what I’ve always done when I want something to go away, ever since I was a child. I don’t know how I would have got through some days without my songs to drown out the world.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“Plus, once you’ve started killing, it’s very difficult to stop. Even though you know you should.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“Not long ago, there was a big strapping lad in here. Six foot four, very upset about something. They gave him three. Three people, following you around all day, watching your every move. If he wasn’t paranoid when he arrived, he certainly was after that.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“He was called DI Matthews and he had a mustache that was so skinny, I wondered why he’d bothered growing it in the first place.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“When a police officer tells you there’s nothing to worry about, you know it’s time to be concerned.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“He won’t strike again tonight, Linda. I can assure you of that.” Malcolm spoke with such certainty, it was difficult not to be taken in. “I’ve been studying serial killers in recent days and it would be totally out of character.” “Jack the Ripper?” I said. Malcolm turned to me in the darkness. “Pardon?” “Jack the Ripper killed two women in one night. They found them within an hour of each other.” “This isn’t Victorian England, Linda. We’re much more civilized these days.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“I agreed with her, because it seemed the polite thing to do,”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“Mother was too busy pouring her day into a television screen, watching her soap operas, passing away her life by staring at other people’s.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“my mother spent most of her time hunting down potential catastrophes and always seemed vaguely disappointed if she didn’t manage to locate one.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“Visitors are scarce underfoot. You’d think people would make more of an effort to come in,”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“There’s a little garden, but apart from people going outside for a cigarette, nine times out of ten it’s deserted.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“perhaps quiet can sometimes be even more unsettling than unquiet, and the sound of nothing ends up being the most distracting thing of all.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“Malcolm… what’s he going to do with them?” Malcolm turned back. “Hmm?” “The lawn shears. Why does he want to borrow them?” We both looked over the hedge at the smooth black tarmac that covered the whole of Steve and Ingrid’s front garden. “He doesn’t have any lawn,” I said. Malcolm’s mouth made a few different shapes, but no words managed to find their way out of it.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“I thought you had a cat,” I said, but Steve didn’t reply, just nodded at Malcolm and smiled. There are times you discover that to some people, you are so insignificant, so unimportant, you grow smaller and smaller and quieter and quieter, until you eventually end up becoming invisible.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“Oh, yes, definitely it will happen again,” he answered before my voice had even found the question mark. “They won’t just stop at two or three, will they? Murderers never do. They get a taste for it, Linda. They keep going until someone catches them.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“And where the second girl was discovered, that bit of waste ground the other side of the industrial estate, it can’t even be seen from the road. You’d never know it was there unless…” He paused very slightly. “Unless you were local.” “One of us, then?” The watery smile disappeared. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Almost certainly one of us.” I looked down at the shears. Malcolm’s grip had tightened, because his knuckles were blanched ever so slightly and there was a very fine tremor, right at the tip of the blade. “Do you think we should be worried, Malcolm?” I didn’t take my eyes off the shears. “Do you think it’s going to happen again—?”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“He leaned on his dustbin. “I thought they were in,” he said. He was holding a pair of lawn shears, but the edges of his lawn looked like they’d long seen better days and I knew for a fact all the houses on that row just had yards at the back, which made me wonder what the shears happened to be doing in his hands in the first place. “You shouldn’t be out on your own, Linda.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“You take care of yourself, Linda,” he said, and it’s so strange because out of all the words they said to me that afternoon, even including the bit about Wales, those were the ones that bothered me the most.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“but I didn’t think DI Mo was thinking about the potholes on the high street or the way next door had their television on too loud.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending

“I even tried wearing some makeup, because that was all they ever talked about, but Mother stopped me as I was leaving for school and said it would probably be better if I practiced a bit more before I went out in public.”
― Joanna Cannon, A Tidy Ending