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

“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

“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

“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

“The ability to research properly is founded on apparently endless and apparently idle curiosity.”
― Peter Grainger, The Late Lord Thorpe

“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

“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

“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

“Someone once said that life is a meditation on death. I”
― Peter Grainger, An Accidental Death

“Clive”
― Peter Grainger, Some Sort of Justice: The gripping new detective mystery from the million-copy-selling crime author

“Beyond that small circle of things, of a life shrunken to what is within an arm’s reach,”
― Peter Grainger, In This Bright Future

“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

“Perhaps the messiness of life makes a nonsense of morality.”
― 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

“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

“The arrival of a new male presence in a household is never straightforward when teenage girls are present, and sometimes – too often, in fact – the girls turn out to be part of the attraction in the first place. Sad and unpleasant but true, as the statistics clearly show.”
― Peter Grainger, A Private Investigation

“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

“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

“Charles McAllister to read ‘Let Me Go’ by Christina Rosetti. She’d never heard of it, obviously. When I come to the end of the road And the sun has set for me I want no rites in a gloom-filled room Why cry for a soul set free? Miss me a little but not for long”
― Peter Grainger, Some Sort of Justice: A Novel

“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

“hassalled”
― Peter Grainger, But For The Grace

“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

“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

“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

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

“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

“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