Elizabeth George > Quotes

“There are no easy answers, there's only living through the questions.”
― Elizabeth George, Missing Joseph

“He had never thought of himself as much of a praying man, but as he sat in the car in the growing darkness and the minutes passed, he knew what it was to pray. It was to will goodness out of evil, hope out of despair, life out of death. It was to will dreams into existence and spectres into reality. It was to will an end to anguish and a beginning to joy.”
― Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance

“Of all my children, you were always the hardest on yourself. You were always looking for the right way to behave, so concerned you might make a mistake. But, darling, there are no mistakes. There are only our wishes, our actions, and the consequences that follow both. There are only events, how we cope with them, and what we learn from the coping."

"That's too easy," he said.

"On the contrary. It's monumentally difficult.”
― Elizabeth George, With No One as Witness

“Everything in our lives," she said quietly, "leads to everything else in our lives. So a moment in the present has a reference point, both in the past and in the future. I want you to know that you--as you are right now and as you ever will be--are fully enough for this moment . . . ”
― Elizabeth George, With No One as Witness

“She thought about how it was so simple with animals. They gave their hearts without question or fear. They had no expectations. They were so easy to love. If people could only be like that, no one would ever be hurt, she thought. No one would ever need to learn how to forgive.”
― Elizabeth George, A Suitable Vengeance

“Barbara wanted to go to tea at Dorchester as much as she wanted to give birth to octuplets.”
― Elizabeth George, Believing the Lie

“Should I anticipate all future conversations with you to take this bent?" Lynley enquired. "Frankly, I've always thought your appeal lay in your complete indifference to personal grooming."

"Those days are past, sir. What c'n I do for you? I reckon this isn't a personal call, made to see if I'm keeping my legs shaved.”
― Elizabeth George, Believing the Lie

“One did not alter lives and simply walk away from the damage.”
― Elizabeth George, With No One as Witness

“I've always found that a rather unfortunate quirk in our species. Everyone pants towards orgasm without pausing to realise that its merely a biological trap designed for the purpose of reproduction. What utter nonsense.”
― Elizabeth George

“Becca took the opportunity to say good-bye to Derric by touching his hand. The heart monitor raced suddenly. She looked from it to Rhonda.
Rhonda’s expression said what her voice did not. Who are you really and why is my son reacting to the touch of your hand?”
― Elizabeth George, The Edge of Nowhere

“My kids' lives aren't about what I want. My kids' lives are about making their own decisions and getting the consequences and coping with those.”
― Elizabeth George, The Punishment She Deserves

“At the end of the day, no one gets away with anything, I've found.”
― Elizabeth George, Believing the Lie

“He pulled to the side and saw, to his chagrin, that Mrs. Prince of the $2,100 bill at the Star Store was just leaving. She waved at him merrily and grinned and Seth waved back gamely. He wondered how Ralph had reacted to the news that his grandson had managed to screw up running the Star Store’s cash register. He could easily imagine Mrs. Prince’s words: “Ralph, I hate to ask, but can that boy even count?”
― Elizabeth George, The Edge of Nowhere

“Grand, there’s one other thing.”
“What’s that, Seth?”
“You always call me ‘favorite male grandchild,’ and I like that. I do. But fact is, I’m your only male grandchild.”
Ralph looked at him, blue eyes sparkling. He smiled. Then he laughed out loud. “Details,” he said. “Mere details, Seth.”
― Elizabeth George

“But if you don't understand that story is character and not just idea, you will not be able to breathe life into even the most intriguing flash of inspiration.”
― Elizabeth George

“...raucous heavy metal of punk guitars screeching like robots put to the rack...”
― Elizabeth George, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner

“He managed to make his request with the minimum of time given to speculating what she looked like naked, forgiving himself for the instant of fantasy by telling himself it was the curse of being male. In the presence of a beautiful woman, he had always experienced that knee-jerk reaction to being reduced - if only momentarily - to skin, bone, and testosterone.”
― Elizabeth George

“People, give up on all sorts of things, Havers. But they rarely if ever give up on love.”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“That's all life is, isn't it? Just continuing, going on.”
― Elizabeth George, Believing the Lie

“As they headed across the hospital lobby, undersheriff Mathieson came in the door at a run. Seth thought about hiding. He thought about stuffing Becca next to an artificial plant with large dusty leaves.”
― Elizabeth George, The Edge of Nowhere

“She stood and scourged him with a final look. “At last I understand what you Catholics mean by purgatory,” she hissed and swept down the aisle to the door.”
― Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance

“The countryside was a thousand different shades of green, from the patchwork quilts of the cultivated land to the desolation of the open moors. The road dipped through dales where forests protected spotless villages and then climbed switchbacked curves to take them again up to the open land where the North Sea wind blew unforgivingly across heather and furze. Here, the only life belonged to the sheep. They wandered free and unfenced, unfettered by the ancient dry stone walls that constructed boundaries for their fellows in the dales below. There were contradictions everywhere. In the cultivated areas, life burgeoned from every cranny and hedgerow, a thick vegetation that in another season would produce the mixed beauties of cow parsley, campion, vetch, and foxglove. It was an area where transportation was delayed while two dogs expertly herded a flock of plump sheep across pasture, down hillside, and along the road for a two-mile stroll into the centre of a village,”
― Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance

“He was shaking so badly, we could have used him to make martinis for James Bond.”
― Elizabeth George, Deception on His Mind

“She'd liked things better when everything had been controlled simply by on and off switches and when push-button telephone and telly remotes were as far as technology had gone. Make a few calls and put the burden of information searching on someone else. That was the ticket. Now, however, things were different. It was the investigator's mental shoe leather that got worn down, not the real thing.”
― Elizabeth George

“You don’t know this yet, darling, because you haven’t experienced that moment when the twisting squeezing crush of your muscles and the urge to expel and to scream at once results in this small mass of humanity that squalls and breathes and comes to rest against your stomach, naked to your nakedness, dependent upon you, blind at that moment, hands instinctively trying to clutch. And once you close those fingers round one of your own…no, not even then…once you look at this life that you’ve created, you know you’ll do anything, suffer anything, to protect it. Mostly for its own sake you protect, of course, because all it is really is living, breathing need. But partly you protect it for your own.”
― Elizabeth George, Missing Joseph

“What I mean is that one's whole life is an autobiography, don't you agree? Whether it gets written or not doesn't make a difference. What goes into it, though? That's what counts.”
― Elizabeth George, A Banquet of Consequences

“He might well have gone on to bow with a flourish had not the precarious position of his codpiece precluded any sudden movement.”
― Elizabeth George, A Suitable Vengeance

“the big lesson about loving someone was coming to understand that when love ended for one person, it ended for both people.”
― Elizabeth George, The Edge of Nowhere

“need say was I need some time off. But she couldn’t do it. “The St. James house at half-past seven,” she repeated. “Got it, sir.” He rang off. Barbara hung up. She tried to plumb the depths of her feelings, to put a name to what was slowly washing through her veins. She wanted to call it shame. She knew it was liberation. She went to tell her father that they would need to reschedule his doctor’s appointment for another day. Kevin Whateley had not gone to the Royal Plantagenet, which was the pub next door to his cottage. Rather, he had walked along the embankment, past the triangular green where he and Matthew had once learned to operate their pair of remote-control planes, and had instead entered an older pub that stood on a spit of land reaching like a curled finger into the Thames. He’d chosen the Blue Dove deliberately. In the Royal Plantagenet—despite its proximity to his house—he might have forgotten for five minutes or so. But the Blue Dove would not allow him to do so. He sat at a table that overlooked the water. In spite of the night’s falling temperature, someone was out, night fishing from a boat, and lights bobbed periodically with the river’s movement. Kevin watched this, allowing his memory to fill with the image of Matthew running along that same dock, falling, damaging a knee, righting himself but not crying at all, even when the blood began to seep from the cut, even when the stitches were later put in. He was a brave little bloke, always had been. Kevin forced his eyes from the dock and fastened them on the mahogany table. Beer mats covered it, advertising Watney’s, Guinness, and Smith’s. Carefully, Kevin stacked them, restacked them, spread them out like cards, restacked them again. He felt how shallow his breathing was and knew that he needed to take in more air. But to breathe deeply was to lose his grip for an instant. He wouldn’t do that. For if he lost control, he didn’t know how he would get it back. So he did without air. He waited. He didn’t know if the man he sought would come into the pub this late on a Sunday night, mere minutes before closing. In fact, he didn’t even know if the man came here at all any longer. But years ago he’d been a regular customer, when Patsy worked long hours behind the bar, before she’d got her job in a South Kensington hotel. For Matthew’s sake, she had said when she’d taken on the”
― Elizabeth George, Well-Schooled in Murder

“cachinnation”
― Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance