Dry Bones that Dream Quotes

“See, squire,” he said to the wide-eyed hotel manager, “our boss tells us we don’t want a lot of fuss about this. None of this evacuating the area bollocks you see on telly. We go in, we disarm him nice and quiet, then bob’s your uncle, we’re out of your hair for good. Okay? No problems for us and no bad publicity for the hotel.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“He watched Clint Eastwood for a while. He had never much enjoyed cop films or cop programs on television, but watching right here and now, he could identify with Dirty Harry tracking down the villains and dealing with them his own way. He had meant what he said to Blackstone. A few minutes alone with Pamela Jeffreys’s attackers and they would know what police brutality was all about.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“It was the feel of the cigarette between his fingers he wanted, the sharp intake of tobacco smoke into the lungs, not some slow oozing of poison through his skin into his blood. Pity about the health problems. He felt rather like St. Augustine must have felt when he wrote in his Confessions: “Give me chastity and continency—but not yet!”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“It was hard to imagine that anything terrible could happen on such a fine spring evening, but the activity around the little terrace house in Armley indicated that evil made no allowances for the weather.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“Rather glumly, he recalled the bit at the beginning of the Trollope biography he was reading, where Trollope considers the dreary sermons persuading people to turn their backs on worldly pleasure in the hope of heaven to come and asks, if such is really the case, then “Why are women so lovely?”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“It’s an odd thing is a professional gone bad. They talk about bent coppers, but what about bent lawyers, bent accountants, bent doctors? If push came to shove, would you expect one crooked businessman to stick up for another?”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“Anyway, I thought I might go. You never know, the murderers might turn up to pay their respects, like they do in books.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“Fool, he told himself. He had been looking for Keith Rothwell in Robert Calvert’s flat. But he wasn’t there. He wasn’t anywhere; he was just a slab of chilled meat waiting for a man with his collar on the wrong way around to chant a few meaningless words that might just ease the living’s fear of death until the next time it touched too close to home for comfort.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“Banks scanned the Yorkshire Post and The Independent reports to see if either newspaper knew more than the police. Sometimes they did, and it could be damned embarrassing all round.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“A cadaveric spasm had caused Rothwell to grab and hold onto a handful of dust at the moment of death, and Banks thought of the T.S. Eliot quotation, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust,” which he had come across as the title of an Evelyn Waugh novel.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“Well, all those are just things, aren’t they? Possessions or activities. Things we do, things we care about. But there’s something behind them all that ties them all together into my life, who I am, what I am. With Keith, you never knew. He was a cipher. For example, I’m sure he loved his family, but he never really showed it or spoke much about it. I don’t know what really mattered to him. He never talked about hobbies or anything like that. I don’t know what he did in his spare time. It’s more than being private or secretive, it’s as if there was a dimension missing, a man with a hole in the middle.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“Traditional police wisdom has it that if a case doesn’t yield leads in the first twenty-four hours, then everyone is in for a long, tough haul.”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account

“fronts for Rothwell’s illegal activities. As Susan was wondering if Robert Calvert’s money”
― Peter Robinson, Final Account