Peter May > Quotes

“But the one thing Fin had learned from his years in the police was that however much you believed you had them figured out, people invariably surprised you.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Life went past you in a flash, like a bus on a rainy night in Ness. You had to be sure it saw you and stopped to let you on, otherwise it was gone without you, and you would be left with a miserable walk home in the wind and the wet.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Knew, too, that it wasn’t just Mona he wanted to run away from. It was everything. Back to a place where life had once seemed simple. A return to childhood, back to the womb. How easy it was now to ignore the fact that he had spent most of his adult life avoiding just that. Easy to forget that as a teenager nothing had seemed more important to him than leaving.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“A light wind blew high clouds across an inky sky, stars like jewels set in ebony. An almost full moon came and went in washes of colourless silver light. The air was filled with the sound of the ocean, the slow steady breath of eternity.”
― Peter May, Entry Island

“When you are young a year is a big part of your life and seems to last for ever. When you are old, there have been too many of them gone before and they pass all too fast. We move so slowly away from birth, and rush so quickly to death.”
― Peter May, The Lewis Man

“All along the ragged coastline, the sea sucked and frothed and growled, tireless legions of riderless white horses crashing up against the stubborn stone of unyielding black cliffs.”
― Peter May, The Lewis Man

“It’s odd how people can get locked into a kind of time warp. There’s a time in their lives that defines them, and they hang on to it for all the subsequent decades; the same hair, the same style of clothes, the same music, even though the world around them has changed beyond recognition.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“The trouble with jealous revenge is that while you might inflict hurt on the other party, it does nothing to lessen the effect of the hurt you are feeling yourself. So everyone ends up unhappy.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“And although I knew nothing of love, I knew that I had found it, and never wanted to lose it.”
― Peter May, Entry Island

“Getting old doesn’t make them any less valid, or any less real. And it’ll be us one day.”
― Peter May, The Lewis Man

“The drive down to Uig passed in a painful blur. Great fat raindrops spat on his windscreen like tears spilled for the dead.”
― Peter May, The Chessmen

“I remember someone once telling me that the sound of the sea was like the sound we hear pre-birth, of our mother’s blood passing through us. And that’s why we are always drawn to the ocean. Like a return to the womb.”
― Peter May, I'll Keep You Safe

“I have since learned never to trust men with combovers. They have absolutely no judgement.”
― Peter May, The Lewis Man

“Faith is the crutch of the weak. You use it to paper over all the contradictions. And you fall back on it to provide easy answers to impossible questions.”
― Peter May, The Lewis Man

“Tri rudan a thig gun iarraidh: an t-eagal, an t-eudach’s an gaol. (Three things that come without asking: fear, love and jealousy.)”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Those amazing sheer rock faces, stacked up in layers, as if they were God’s archives, a geological history of the Hebrides. Seams of rock like the rings of a tree, but taking you right back to the very beginnings of time.”
― Peter May, I'll Keep You Safe

“Now he was learning again how easy it was to be lonely in a crowd.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“It’s odd how people can get locked into a kind of time warp. There’s a time in their lives that defines them, and they hang on to it for all the subsequent decades; the same hair, the same style of clothes, the same music, even though the world around them has changed beyond recognition. My”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“Maybe if he hadn’t devoted so much of his time to his God, he might have had more of it left for living.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“They don’t have Chinese food in China, Mom.’ Her mother frowned. ‘Don’t they?’ ‘No, they just call it food here.”
― Peter May, The Runner

“And it doesn’t matter what generation you belong to, nothing changes. It’s the same people abusing the same power, and making the same money.”
― Peter May, A Winter Grave

“Long stretches of empty road linked bleak and exposed settlements huddled around churches of various denominations. The Church of Scotland. The United Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland. The Free Church of Scotland (Continuing)—the Wee Frees, as the free churches were universally known. Each one was a division of the one before. Each one a testimony to the inability of man to agree with man. Each one a rallying point for hatred and distrust of the other.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“I don’t think of myself as old. In my head I’m still the boy I was at seventeen. I just can’t do the things I did back then, and I get a shock when I look in the mirror. But I don’t see me as you do. In fact, I can look at fellas ten years my junior and think of them as ‘old boys.’ I look at attractive young women and delude myself that they might still fancy me. It’s just a matter of perspective.” He”
― Peter May, Runaway

“People long dead, like everyone else pressed between these pages. Lives that had come and gone, genes passing from one generation to the next in a line that ended”
― Peter May, A Winter Grave

“housed in the British Museum in London, that repository of stolen artefacts from around the world.”
― Peter May, The Lewis Trilogy: The Blackhouse, The Lewis Man and The Chessmen

“Because the law is made to keep the powerful in power, and the rich wealthy. As well as the poor in poverty.”
― Peter May, Entry Island

“But time never passes so quickly as when it is in short supply.”
― Peter May, The Blackhouse

“But as his old history teacher had been fond of saying, the only thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history.”
― Peter May, A Winter Grave

“The Juez de Instrucción did not miss it. He said stiffly, ‘Presumably you are aware how our system works here in Spain?’ ‘I am,’ Mackenzie said. ‘Very similar to the French. A Guardia Civil which is part of the army, like the French Gendarmerie. A fragmented civilian police force which doesn’t talk to the military, and a system of judges who know nothing about police work but somehow contrive to direct investigations.’ Judge Aguado’s pallor darkened, and a clenching of his jaw was betrayed by the depressions that appeared in each of his cadaverous cheeks. He said, ‘While the British police divide and subdivide themselves into so many different forces that they lack any coherence.’ ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ Mackenzie said, oblivious of the judge’s intention to offend him in return. ‘They are uncoordinated and completely disjointed. Criminals are slipping through the cracks all the time.’ No one knew what to say. And it was only when Mackenzie caught Cristina’s smirk”
― Peter May, A Silent Death

“forever. Life might be hard. But death was so frighteningly easy.”
― Peter May, Lockdown