Ruth Rendell > Quotes

“Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.”
― Ruth Rendell, One Across, Two Down

“I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.”
― Ruth Rendell

“The knives of jealousy are honed on details.”
― Ruth Rendell

“She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to.”
― Ruth Rendell

“Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“...selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.”
― Ruth Rendell

“It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.”
― Ruth Rendell, Live Flesh

“You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you’ve hurt them, marked them, they’re even more sick and ugly, aren’t they? And they’re afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn’t very pleasant, but you did ask.”
“Go on” he said.
“So you’ve got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who’s unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that’s what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they’re dirty, sovered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they’re hateful, they’re low, they’re sub-human. That’s all they’re good for, being hit, being reduced even further.”
― Ruth Rendell, Simisola

“open”
― Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised

“9781409067832”
― Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised

“Greed and envy took from a man’s heart everything but—well, greed and envy.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Best Man to Die

“She wasn't there. He wouldn't have had to look too closely. She stood out from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer.”
― Ruth Rendell, Thirteen Steps Down

“Don’t hate anyone,” she had said. “It’s quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Girl Next Door

“She didn't really know London, only lived in it.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Water's Lovely

“for. One of its headlamps was broken and its chrome rim”
― Ruth Rendell, The Best Man to Die

“I don't judge people. I don't think we should/”
― Ruth Rendell

“You couldn’t love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?”
― Ruth Rendell

“People are different in reality from the way you've seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they're less consistent. They surprise you all the time.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Water's Lovely

“As in most cases when the truth becomes clear you wonder how you could ever have seen things differently.”
― Ruth Rendell, Not in the Flesh

“standing”
― Ruth Rendell, End in Tears

“The sensations he had were shared by many of the young, poor and beautiful: how unfair it was that they should be denied benefits which the old and ugly enjoyed.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Sight for Sore Eyes

“SECOND”
― Ruth Rendell, End In Tears

“People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Sight for Sore Eyes

“I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden".”
― Ruth Rendell

“lady,” a word she had found out came from the Anglo-Saxon “lafdig,” meaning “she who makes the bread.”
― Ruth Rendell, Not in the Flesh

“You’re supposed to be a detective. Well, detect.”
― Ruth Rendell, From Doon with Death

“The fact that an opinion has been widely held is no evidence whatever that it isn’t utterly absurd. Indeed, in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”
― Ruth Rendell, End in Tears