The Long Divorce Quotes

“meaningless piety, she knew – but to be always meaningful makes a cold world.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“What he said was, they're finding so many new groups and sub-groups that in ten or twenty years you'll be able to identify a chap straight away just by his blood, like as if it was his fingerprints.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“Scotland Yard isn't called in nearly as often as detective novelists seem to think,”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“What's more, I don't believe any policeman uses words like "antonym". I don't believe you're a policeman at all.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“I find it worth while to help clean up the mess made by malevolence and folly. But I do try not to like the mess for its own sake.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“At breakfast-time, however, destiny's preparations were still not quite complete,”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“THE majority of us are permitted to cope with the important events of our lives in a decently leisurely manner – with ample breathing-space, that is to say, in which to assimilate one shock and recuperate before the next.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“Brooding over this instance of misplaced fancy, Mr Datchery was conducted into a large and airy study on the right-hand side of the hall, and while Colonel Babington fiddled with a tantalus, sat contemplating the cat Lavender, which had changed its mind and followed them in, and was now distractedly perambulating the furniture.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“where there are cottages, there will be tots also, squatting pensively in the dust or moving unsteadily about, absorbed in the tremendous adventure of proceeding unaided from one point to the next.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“Women, who on grounds of modesty alone might be expected to prefer being killed or cured by one of their own sex, prove as incalculable in this as in most other things;”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“A nomadic chicken was pacing across the street,”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce

“wife punctured this feeble artifice without effort, and carried him off incontinently to whatever of marital purgatory she had hoarded up for him,”
― Edmund Crispin, The Long Divorce