Peter Swanson > Quotes

“Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don’t just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“Everyone has a full life, even if it ends soon. All lives are complete experiences.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“any life at all is probably more than any of us deserves.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“Everyone dies, but not everyone has to see someone they love with another person. She struck the first blow.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended?”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“And to take another life was, in many ways, the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“Or was she one of those rarities, a human who didn’t need other humans in her life?”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I’ve always felt that being with people, as opposed to being alone, can make you feel loneliness more acutely.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal—of a crow or a fox or an owl—and not of a normal human being. I”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I love the beach, everything except the fucking sand, the fucking sun, and the fucking water”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“No, the ache in my chest was that I felt alone. That there were no other humans in the world who knew what I knew. I”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I am a happy person, always have been. But that’s just my personality, which has nothing to do with this broken brain that periodically and very convincingly tells me that I’m a worthless person who doesn’t deserve to live.”
― Peter Swanson, Before She Knew Him

“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
― Peter Swanson, The Christmas Guest

“I dreamed of my other family, the imaginary one with boring parents,”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I always say that two martinis are too many, and three is not enough.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I had survived the vulnerability of childhood, and the danger of first love. There was comfort in knowing that I would never be in either of those positions again, that, from now on, I would be the only person responsible for my own happiness.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“My father used to say: every hundred years, all new people. I don’t know exactly why he said it, or what it meant to him—a variation on being mindful of death, I suppose—but I knew what it meant to me.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“boys who had been born on third base and thought they hit a triple (as my mother often quoted),”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“when she was a seven-year-old she had declared rain to be the best weather because it was reading weather.”
― Peter Swanson, A Talent for Murder

“They had a secret, the two of them, and there was no better way to start a friendship than with a secret.”
― Peter Swanson, Before She Knew Him

“If I had reasons to love you, then there’d be reasons for me to not love you”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“I tried to sleep, falling into a doze as thin as tissue paper,”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I imagine she acted the way she thought you wanted to see her.”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“I know, right. I keep thinking”
― Peter Swanson, The Kind Worth Killing

“Being an avid mystery reader as an adolescent does not prepare you for real life. I truly imagined that my adult existence would be far more booklike than it turned out to be. I thought, for example, that there would be several moments in which I got into a cab to follow someone. I thought I'd attend far more readings of someone's will, and that I'd need to know how to pick a lock, and that any time I went on vacation (especially to old creaky inns or rented lake houses) something mysterious would happen. I thought train rides would inevitably involve a murder, that sinister occurrences would plague wedding weekends, and that old friends would constantly be getting in touch to ask for help, to tell me that their lives were in danger. I even thought quicksand would be an issue.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“If you gave a man just the smallest amount of power—a handsome face, the ability to sing, a little money—the first thing he’d do is destroy a woman, or two if he could.”
― Peter Swanson, Before She Knew Him

“The awful thing about loneliness, Jack thought, not for the first time, is that it isn’t always cured by other people.”
― Peter Swanson, Nine Lives

“He’d always wondered what was worse: to feel emptiness and not know what would make it go away, or to feel emptiness and know exactly what was missing. Tonight, for whatever reason, he seemed to have the answer. He understood with evangelical clarity how fleeting our lives are, and how foolish it is to mourn those who’ve left too soon.”
― Peter Swanson, Nine Lives

“She rarely talked, and when she did, it was only about books.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders

“If you are still alive when you read this, close your eyes. I am under their lids, growing black.”
― Peter Swanson, Eight Perfect Murders