G.M. Malliet > Quotes

“For it was a truth universally acknowledged that a single vicar must be in want of a wife.”
― G.M. Malliet, Wicked Autumn

“Oh please tell me we're not doing the Poirot thing again — the suspects in the library with the candlestick or whatever'.

Max looked at him [DCI Cotton]. 'Fruitcake in this case. And what would you prefer? A car chase? It’s the most efficient way to flush out a killer, as Dame Agatha Christie well knew.”
― G.M. Malliet, A Demon Summer

“...every year for decades there had been great excitement over the Largest Vegetable competition ("That would be my husband", was the standard comment).”
― G.M. Malliet, Wicked Autumn

“Every seed that produces this miraculous bounty has the code that will heal all ills - and a sprout travels from the darkness towards the light, just as we all must do. We simply aren't evolved enough yet to understand how it all fits together.”
― G.M. Malliet, Wicked Autumn

“[From p. 70 of the Midnight Ink paperback.]

"You have to have a corpse by page fifty-seven. Page seventy at the absolute outside."
"Says who?'
"Why, so says everyone. It's the industry standard."

[There has been, as yet, no corpse.]”
― G.M. Malliet, Death and the Lit Chick

“REPEATED SIGHTINGS OF THE majestic gothic spires of King’s College Chapel cannot dull their impact. As the visitor to Cambridge ambles south from St. John’s Street into Trinity, Trinity into King’s Parade, the Chapel never fails to catch the eye unawares, often bringing the stroller to a standstill,”
― G.M. Malliet, Death of a Cozy Writer

“For Lily had always been an anxious, highly strung personality, her mind like a channel tuned permanently to the emergency frequency.”
― G.M. Malliet, Wicked Autumn

“A lot of nonsense is spoken at funerals, especially when the deceased had not been well liked in life. Many euphemisms are called into play: "vital," "energetic," and (repetitively) "full of life".”
― G.M. Malliet

“Maigret books of Georges Simenon”
― G.M. Malliet, Augusta Hawke

“him.” “Ah,” she said again, but this time with a far more weighted emphasis. “Poor Anna,” I added. “Hmm.” There was condemnation in that hmm, in the lift of one dark eyebrow that accompanied it, and in the sharp stab of the next chrysanthemum into the vase, but she was not going to be drawn into speaking ill of the dead, not she. If Elizabeth Fortescue thought Anna, too, was a ninny—or, more likely, a slut—I was not going to hear it from her. At least, not directly. Fortunately, she had fewer qualms about commenting on how the living were managing their lives, as she began to”
― G.M. Malliet, Weycombe

“Vanity might be a "sin" according to some lights, but he thought in measured doses it was one of life's allowable simple pleasures. It helped everyone get through their days.”
― Malliet, G.M

“The man liked doing magic tricks. He was an IT type, a techie, their minds work that way. Never the straight path, oh no, not when some circuitous route will do.”
― G.M. Malliet, In Prior's Wood

“She was such a poster child for the twisted result of clinging to a joyless, punitive religion, a religion that sapped all the joy from life and led, in its final stages, to the extremism that poisoned the well of sane discourse.”
― G.M. Malliet, A Fatal Winter