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 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

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

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

“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

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

“I dreamed of my other family, the imaginary one with boring parents,”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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 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

“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

“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

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

“he spent most days in a haze of disinterest.”
― Peter Swanson, The Girl with a Clock for a Heart

“Chance of romance: nonexistent. Chance of gothic thriller murder mystery: growing by the minute.”
― Peter Swanson, The Christmas Guest

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