Belinda Bauer > Quotes

“Death was an inverse Big Bang; an impossible magic trick where everything had become nothing in the very same instant, where one state had been replaced so completely by another that no evidence of the first could be detected, and where the catalyst had been vaporized by the sheer shock of the new.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker

“The coma ward was boring yet difficult. Like golf.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker

“Everybody else possessed the key to popularity and happiness, and his clumsy attempts to find his own key always ended with other children looking at him funny, or calling him names.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker

“He stared at Avery's socks and felt an odd sense of wonder. Socks were so normal. So mundane. How could someone who pulled on socks in the morning be a serial killer? Socks were not hard or dangerous. Socks were funny; foot mittens, that's what socks were. They made a knobbly hinge of your toes and became comical sock-puppets. Surely anyone who wore socks could not truly be a threat to him or anyone else?”
― Belinda Bauer, Blacklands

“Then he stared down at the twinkling lights and sobbed, "All my stars fell out of the sky.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Beautiful Dead

“You're different, you know."
"Only different from you," he said. "Not different from me.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker

“Death wants his Maiden”
― Belinda Bauer, The Beautiful Dead

“There are worse things than dying."
"Really?" said Meg.
"Of course," said the tech. "Living badly.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker

“Apparently, men grew wiser with every grey hair, while women just grew invisible.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Beautiful Dead

“There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who think it could never happen to them. And those who know it will ...”
― Belinda Bauer, Snap

“IT WAS BEDTIME and Adam was at the back door, calling the cat. ‘Chiiiiips! Chiiiii-ips! Come on, Chips!’ Catherine smiled to herself. Chips always made Adam beg. She never begged. She called, he came, or she locked him out for the night. Simple. Chips knew that, and always shot in from the garden like a furry white arrow. But he had Adam wrapped around his little claw, and wouldn’t come in until his own personal human had been thoroughly humiliated – whistling, wheedling, and shaking the box of treats like Barry Manilow on the maracas.”
― Belinda Bauer, Snap

“Steven was writing to the Devil and asking for mercy.”
― Belinda Bauer, Blacklands

“Truly visible by his absence”
― Belinda Bauer

“Sweet little thing says she still wants to marry him. Breaks your heart: She sighed and sounded sincere, so Tracy nodded in a way she hoped denoted that she, too, was a little bit heartbroken — even though she thought that if her (hypothetical) boyfriend were in a coma for more than a few weeks, she’d probably just cut her losses and move on, not stick around to watch him shit in his pants for the next fifty years.”
― Belinda Bauer, Rubbernecker

“It would all make her a very smooth liar, he said.
She's obsessed with cats, shrugged Marvel. Who knows WHAT she's capable of?”
― Belinda Bauer, Snap

“The kind all wars are about – greedy people wanting more than they need and taking it from the weak and the vulnerable. Selfish arseholes stealing the beauty from the world that belongs to all of us.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Impossible Thing

“The longer DCI John Marvel worked in homicide, the more he disliked people. He’d never met one he didn’t hate – or despise, at the very least – and he could see the bad in anyone.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Shut Eye

“She had arthritis, which meant that sometimes she experienced the agony of her diamond rings not fitting. She complained to the doctor about it constantly; she’d paid good money for those rings and somehow felt that the NHS simply didn’t want her wearing them – socialist cartel that it was.”
― Belinda Bauer, Snap

“Decide what you want and then work out how to get it.”
― Belinda Bauer, Blacklands

“All I’m saying is, when you have a kid, then suddenly you understand how easy it is to make mistakes, see? And you forgive your parents a bit, you know?”
― Belinda Bauer, Snap

“Avery adapted so fast he'd have blown a hole straight through Darwinism.”
― Belinda Bauer, Blacklands

“He looked like a circus acrobat who had been reassigned to bedpans and taken to them like a duck to water. He didn't miss a beat while they talked and his military bed-making was hypnotic to watch (...) He stripped beds, bundled dirty sheets, shook out fresh ones and then wound mattresses in them as neat and as tight as if he ws working in the gift-wrap department of the Great Pyramid at Giza. M. wondered how the hell the old folk managed to fight their way between the top and bottoms sheets every night, and had a mental image of residents spending years shivering above the covers, too frail to gain entry to their won beds.”
― Belinda Bauer, Darkside

“He’d taken his eye off the ball. He gritted his teeth. Being in charge was relentless. No wonder his father had given up.”
― Belinda Bauer, Snap

“Often it felt almost as if he had died too, because all that was left now was a pale shadow of himself, hanging like limp lace at an airless window.”
― Belinda Bauer, Exit

“This was what the beautiful dead left behind when they moved out of the corporeal and into the hearts and minds of all humankind. This connection, this sense of sharing something wonderful, something beyond mere life, something that had endured and would endure.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Beautiful Dead

“He was only wearing trainers, but a kick in the face is a kick in the face.”
― Belinda Bauer, Snap

“People told you things over a cup of tea that they wouldn’t under torture.”
― Belinda Bauer, The Facts of Life and Death

“Mrs Pitt shouted up the stairs for her daughter with a voice like a foghorn, then smiled cheerfully at Calvin. "She'll be down in a mo," she said, and showed him in to the front room, which was a colourful sea of Lego bricks with a small child bobbing in it.”
― Belinda Bauer, Exit

“Ahead of the tin was all craning white heads and expectant muttering, behind it was silence and crumbs. Lynne”
― Belinda Bauer, Darkside

“Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas, Nobody!”
― Belinda Bauer, The Beautiful Dead