Michael Gilbert > Quotes

“Only after a person has their heart broken does the world appear as it truly is.”
― Michael Gilbert, Perfected Sinfulness

“Birds sing even when the world is filled with sadness. I don't know why people can't do the same thing.”
― Michael Gilbert, Perfected Sinfulness

“What plagues people is not those who don't love them, but those who do.”
― Michael Gilbert, Perfected Sinfulness

“I've learned that sometimes a smile represents the greatest form of deceit.”
― Michael Gilbert, Perfected Sinfulness

“I want a man who watches me walk away.”
― Michael Gilbert, Modern Happiness

“I’ve learned that sometimes a smile represents the greatest form of deceit.”
― Michael Gilbert, Perfected Sinfulness

“Mousey Jones was a small character who made a living by picking up the crumbs which lie round the wainscoting and in the dark corners of that big living-room of crime, the West End. His staple occupation was the insertion of lumps of putty into the return-coin slots of public telephones—”
― Michael Gilbert, Death Has Deep Roots: A Second World War Mystery

“The detective story is the sonnet. It is precise, neat, satisfyingly symmetrical, constrained, but sustained, by the nicety of its form… The thriller is the ode. It has no formal rules at all. It has no precise framework. It has no top and, Heaven knows, no bottom.”
― Michael Gilbert, Death Has Deep Roots: A Second World War Mystery

“elaborately-simple beautifully conceived clothes. The face itself was sufficient to place her within ten square miles of the world’s surface. Only one capital city could produce that deepest of dark brown hair, with high-lights of black, that white neck solidly angled to the shoulders, yet too well-proportioned to seem thick: Siamese cat’s eyes of very light blue, which were so rarely”
― Michael Gilbert, Death Has Deep Roots: A Second World War Mystery