Colin Cotterill > Quotes

“He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“Honesty can be a dirty gift.”
― Colin Cotterill

“A hero without faults is like an omelet without little bits of eggshell in it.”
― Colin Cotterill, Love Songs from a Shallow Grave

“There was nothing fake or added about him. He was all himself.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“The woman’s brain has two hemispheres,” she slurred. “One for loving, one for hating. They can operate quite competently at the same time.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Merry Misogynist

“I’m left doing all the unskilled labor myself, which is exactly when you realize there’s nothing unskilled about labor.”
― Colin Cotterill, Anarchy and Old Dogs

“Concentrate on the small things and do them well.”
― Colin Cotterill, Anarchy and Old Dogs

“Forget the planet, save the garden.”
― Colin Cotterill

“Honesty can be a dirty gift. It can muddy a sparkling stream of memories.”
― Colin Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth

“There was a Lao proverb that called teachers the engineers of the soul”
― Colin Cotterill, The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

“Do you suppose it all means something?

That we're being left clues?

Perhaps.

Then, no offense, but I fear they've badly overestimated us.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“Dipping a cockroach in ink and having it scamper around the page would have left more legible traces to the average reader.”
― Colin Cotterill, Curse Of The Pogo Stick

“So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And Communism had brought him back full circle to poverty.”
― Colin Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth

“All right, here comes the philosophy. You can leave if you like but I suggest you stick it out. You don’t measure your own success against the size or volume of the effect you’re having. You gauge it from the difference you make to the subject you’re working on. Is leading an army that wins a war really that much more satisfying than teaching a four-year-old to ride a bicycle? At our age,” she said, “you go for the small things and you do them as well as you can.” In the back of the pony trap, squashed beside his two large boxes, Siri still felt Daeng’s lip prints on his cheek and heard her whisper, “Go for the small things and do them well.” It would be his new mantra. Forget the planet, save the garden.”
― Colin Cotterill, Anarchy and Old Dogs

“This skin, this hair, all this outside stuff. It isn't me. It's just my package. It's like the wrapper around the sweet; it isn't the sweet itself. What we really are is all inside the package. All our feelings. All our good moods and bad moods. All our ideas, our cleverness, our love, that's what a person really is.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“If nothing else, my analysis of George W.’s oratory style had taught me that a sincere countenance and a confident stance were sufficient to distract your audience from the fact that you were talking rubbish.”
― Colin Cotterill, Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Dtui with her laundry-bin build was off the scale. There were no suitors queuing at her door. They wouldn’t have to dig deep to find her kindness and humour, but they didn’t even bring a spade.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“Very soon he’ll be well enough to roll about in mud, eat worms, and walk aimlessly around Nam Poo Fountain again.’ ‘I’m sure he doesn’t see it as aimless. We all have different goals. His are achievable.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Merry Misogynist

“He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“May I ask how your revolution's going?

Revolutions always go more smoothly around a campfire in the jungle than they do in real life.”
― Colin Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth

“Encounters with the living always drained him more than those with the dead.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“Chom. Don’t you have an urge to see justice done?” “It’s not nearly as strong as my urge to reach forty with a complete set of limbs.”
― Colin Cotterill, Grandad, There's a Head on the Beach

“...socialism had somehow made time more flexible. There were often situations when 1 PM and 5 PM were interchangeable.”
― Colin Cotterill, Curse of the Pogo Stick

“Like you, I grew up in a remote animist village. But then I went to a strict Catholic education in France. I was perfectly content to accept the grand Shee Yee of the Otherworld and the Lord B, and Jesus and his mother as my spiritual icons as long as I didn't have to spend too long on my knees. I would have settled for a committee. I just wanted order. But once I started to see my own ghosts I understood what these religions were all about. They were clubs set up by people like me to stop themselves from going mad. You know what I really think happens? You die. You wait for your number. There's a bit of time to take care of unfinished business. And you pass on. And, as you don't come back, nobody actually knows what you pass on to. But that description has never been acceptable. People want an ending. They don't want to vanish into thin air. So these great religious gurus made some endings up. The more comfortable and happy your ending, the more members signed up and paid their fees. And the kings and emperors started to add rules and regulations to subjugate the commoners and keep them in line. As so they invented hell and told you if you coveted your neighbor's mule you wouldn't even get into the clubhouse at the end of it all.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Woman Who Wouldn't Die

“His jacket was a little too large and his choice of tie made you think he didn’t have a wife at home, at least not a fully sighted one.”
― Colin Cotterill, Killed at the Whim of a Hat

“Their version of rock-paper-scissors was elephant—fist, mouse—palm, and ant—little finger. The elephant crushed the mouse, the mouse squashed the ant, and the ant crawled up the elephant’s trunk and paralyzed his brain.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Merry Misogynist

“THERE MIGHT BE A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE MOON'S ENERGY WHEN IT'S FULL AND THE ELECTRICAL IMPULSES IN THE BRAIN.”
― Colin Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth

“The current philosophy was that Buddha was a communist.”
― Colin Cotterill, The Coroner's Lunch

“You didn’t have to travel very far out of Vientiane before the road turned to pebbles and potholes. Traveling in a truck was like falling down an endless flight of uneven steps in a coffin.”
― Colin Cotterill, Disco for the Departed

“Fear helps us survive. I've spent a larger portion of my life being afraid than I have being in control. But, here I am. Forget this escape idea, son. It won't help you or your family. Play the game. Find a tall tree somewhere. A tree that's survived all the coups and massacres of history. Go to that tree and dig a hole near its roots and bury your pride there.”
― Colin Cotterill, Disco for the Departed