The Body on the Moor Quotes

“The crimes Myra and Ian were being accused of were impossible to understand. But this was as it should be. If such atrocities could be understood, then it meant they could be explained... and if they could be explained, then they could be explained away. And that would be wrong”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor

“She couldn't move, couldn't speak. Fighting for breath, the sound when it came, was a raw, base animal sound. A sound that frightened the man in her life, there being nowhere to run and hide from it. Nowhere to shelve his emotions and detach himself in ways he usually might”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor

“Let Thomas tell her she could stay forever. Ronald didn't know what forever meant and didn't think he had the right to promise the future when the future wasn't his to give”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor

“Connie thought again how Ian and Myra seemed to be bound tightly together. Reading it in their surreptitious glances, their private whisperings; it was as if no one else existed beyond them. And if they did, they were nothing. Trivial. Mere distractions”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor

“The news that Thomas was making the child clothes unsettled him. It confirmed his fears: his brother had grown deeply attached to her. Ronald may blame himself for his brother's thwarted existence, that he lost the woman he loved and any chance of a family of his own, but this child wasn't theirs, she could never be theirs, and what they were doing by keeping her was wrong.”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor

“Not that he believed in heaven. He knew that beyond this world, there was nothing. God was an invention created by one man to keep another at bay. He stopped going to church the year his mother died and didn't care two figs what his neighbours thought. His neighbours, with their sprays and insecticides, doing wrong to the land. Nature was his god. Nature was the omnipotent one. The thing all mortals would have to answer to in the end”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor

“I think we look for in others what we see in ourselves”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor

“Ronald thought of how close he'd come to death, and how he'd never been so frightened. The looks on their faces, the pleasure it had given them. The glee. They were evil... real evil. It wasn't as if Ronald was unfamiliar with violence; his father had brought him up on it, albeit a more frenzied kind. What he'd just undergone was different. It was visceral. It had been practised and administered by people who seemed comfortable with killing”
― Rebecca Griffiths, The Body on the Moor