Peter Grainger > Quotes

“You think it’s just selfishness?’ ‘Just? Makes it sound trivial. All crime is caused by selfishness, I say. It’s the ‘Me first, my needs first’. Take that away and you’re about one step from paradise. Don’t ask me what the last step is, I don’t know, but it sounds good.”
― Peter Grainger, An Accidental Death

“Problems are just opportunities looked at the wrong way round – that’s what the positive thinkers say, isn’t it?”
― Peter Grainger, The Rags of Time

“When we go, so does the world as we  have known it, for it is known only by us and therefore only within us. At least, so some of the empiricists believe – but such beliefs are only another form of faith.”
― Peter Grainger, The Rags of Time

“As I’ve heard you say plenty of times, what we know and what we can prove are often two quite different things.”
― Peter Grainger, Songbird

“and then a solitary green speck appeared in the top left, a little, flickering oasis of hope in this digitally-challenged desert.”
― Peter Grainger, Time and Tide

“Three qualities perhaps seem to be present in all of them, and the first of these is having a peculiar kind of attention – one might call it active attention. Where most of us see, they look: when most of us hear, they listen. Brilliant naturalists have similar abilities – their eyesight and hearing seem phenomenal but not so, it is in the ways of looking and listening. It’s all in the mind. Ironically, these are the individuals most likely to be called absent-minded by the rest of us because that kind of heightened inner focus comes at a cost to our lives in the workaday world. Jo”
― Peter Grainger, The Camera Man

“don’t know about justice. I’ve never seen myself on a white charger, righting wrongs – but we have to catch people so that they can’t create all this again. And so that other people get the message – you will be caught, you will pay. We never know how many selfish acts we prevent when we show people the consequences, but we have to keep showing them the consequences. These are the consequences.’ Smith had raised a hand, palm open towards the new grave. ‘You think it’s just selfishness?’ ‘Just? Makes it sound trivial. All crime is caused by selfishness, I say. It’s the ‘Me first, my needs first’ attitude.”
― Peter Grainger, An Accidental Death

“people knocking on the door about the census. How a person is supposed”
― Peter Grainger, In This Bright Future

“Regret is pointless, but so is experience if you don’t learn from it.”
― Peter Grainger, Persons of Interest

“There is something primeval in being stalked by a predator; one feels terrifyingly alive when one is horribly close to extinction.”
― Peter Grainger, Lane

“but the longer you live the more things seem to echo. Maybe, if you live long enough, that’s all there is – echoes and the echoes of echoes. That would be strange indeed.”
― Peter Grainger, The Rags of Time

“Long experience had taught him that it was futile to try not to think about things – instead, it was better simply to let go and allow the things to come, to be the station through which the things pass like little toy trains, to watch them go by.”
― Peter Grainger, Persons of Interest

“He said, ‘Tell me about the primary sort. Just one sentence if you can.’ ‘They don’t empathise, they don’t share in other’s emotions, they don’t feel guilt or remorse. The rest of us would hardly recognise the world if we saw it through their eyes.”
― Peter Grainger, A Private Investigation

“Maggie told him about her own father and the importance of ‘the chair’; as the world of the aged shrinks, the items that remain within it take on greater and greater value. ‘The chair’ becomes the tiny territory from which what remains of our lives is viewed, an eyrie, a lonely crag… Smith gave her a quizzical look and said that he would not write that down but that it was very poetic. Third,”
― Peter Grainger, But For The Grace

“hassalled”
― Peter Grainger, But For The Grace

“We have to have a reason for what we’re doing if it’s to mean anything - otherwise it’s just a mindless existence.”
― Peter Grainger, Persons of Interest

“Arrests are made all the time, and not always because the police think they have the guilty party, but the public, led by the media, God bless them, assume you’ve caught the bugger as soon as someone is arrested.”
― Peter Grainger, A Private Investigation

“One moves painstakingly along the chain of connections, hoping it will turn somewhere into a chain of causality; sometimes one returns to links in the chain that one has visited before, sometimes one returns several times, refining questions in the light of what one has subsequently uncovered,”
― Peter Grainger, In This Bright Future

“This was the home of the old life and the old love, but now change is coming. And change is inevitable. Except from a vending machine.”
― Peter Grainger, A Private Investigation

“If you move through the undergrowth of people's lives, you can get close to the truths that dwell there.”
― Peter Grainger, The Camera Man

“Maggie told him about her own father and the importance of ‘the chair’; as the world of the aged shrinks, the items that remain within it take on greater and greater value. ‘The chair’ becomes the tiny territory from which what remains of our lives is viewed, an eyrie, a lonely crag…”
― Peter Grainger, But For The Grace

“degree. Short term memory is usually considered to be up to thirty seconds – that’s all – but another part of the brain can be trained to organise and store those perceptions indefinitely. Neuroscientists also believe there is no effective limit to the amount of information a healthy human brain can store in this way if it has had the right sort of training. Detectives who had”
― Peter Grainger, The Late Lord Thorpe

“A born detective never needs to be told that everybody lies – he or she has always known it.”
― Peter Grainger, Time and Tide

“Sometimes we laughed so much it hurt. Crazy, isn’t it, when you’re surrounded by people who want to blow you to bits every single day?’ He waited, wanting her to answer that question, to say whether she thought it was or was not crazy to laugh like that in the face of imminent death. ‘The psychologists say it’s a coping mechanism, which is the sort of thing people in small rooms in universities you’ve never heard of usually come up with. I just think that when your life is on the line, you live it more – I don’t know. More something. More intensely? More fully?”
― Peter Grainger, One-way Tickets

“Too much was changing too quickly now, and at the same time he was losing the ability to adapt to change. A natural process, just the way of things, and if one resists it for too long one becomes bitter and then foolish and then a danger to others. He had seen these things happen to older men before him, and he was lucky – he could choose not to have it happen to him. He had done so.”
― Peter Grainger, Time and Tide

“Authority is a peculiar thing. We can all draw up a list of the individual qualities needed to gain it – conviction, strength of will, skill in communication, some sort of courage, maybe – but those with natural authority have an indefinable something else. If you dislike them, perhaps it’s arrogance.”
― Peter Grainger, Songbird

“Uncovering the past was like uncovering some archeological remains, best done slowly with a fine brush, time’s work being so fragile.”
― Peter Grainger, An Accidental Death

“people too are all of those things, and if you don’t learn to work out people you remain a clodhopper, a slave to procedures and processes, someone who pursues targets rather than wrongdoers.”
― Peter Grainger, But For The Grace

“Perhaps the messiness of life makes a nonsense of morality.”
― Peter Grainger, But For The Grace

“The heavens opened and there was a thunderstorm. The rain hammered on the windscreen and the wipers became frantic in their efforts to push it away; headlights came on everywhere and the spray from tyres seemed to be going in all directions at once. It was going to be short and sharp, and so Smith pulled up in the road outside Woodlands where he’d waited once before, giving the rain a minute or two to cease. He wound down the windows a little and the smell of it wafted into the car – petrichor, the magical scent released when the golden blood of the gods touches the arid rocks of the earth. The older you get, he thought, the more evocative such things become. It smells like a secret.”
― Peter Grainger, The Camera Man