Mo Hayder > Quotes

“In most crime novels the violent act, usually the murder, is the engine. Take that away and there is little left to drive the story along. So I do get a little cross with authors who aren’t precise about the violence they’re using to create tension because I feel they’re being dishonest with their readers. If people don’t like the blood and violence in my books, fine, they can always close the cover and put it aside and maybe read a romance instead. – Mo Hayder”
― Mo Hayder

“I'm not very good at knowing what other people are thinking, but I do know that you can see tragedy, real tragedy, sitting just inside a person's gaze. You can almost always see where a person has been if you look hard enough.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“I had an overwhelming sense of the lonliness of this city - a trillion souls in their bedrooms, high in the cliffs of windows. I thought of what was underneath it all - I thought of the electricty cables, steam, water, fire, subway trains and lava in the city's guts, the subterranean rumbling of trains and earthquakes. I thought of the dead souls from the war, concreted over.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“Mr Jack Caffery', he says slowly. 'This is the truth, but don't be afraid of it. Your life will be different from this day on, but you will survive. You will continue.'
'How do you know?'
'I know because you and I? We are the same person.”
― Mo Hayder, Wolf

“I noticed that in Tokyo people didn’t smell. It was funny. I couldn’t smell them, and they didn’t say very much: the trains were packed but it was quite silent, like being jammed into a carriage with a thousand shop-window mannequins.”
― Mo Hayder, Tokio

“Maybe that was the price of ignorance, I thought, looking at the naked vagrant. Maybe Japan had to pay for the ignorant things it did in Nanking. Because ignorance as I'd got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“I hooked the condom out with the end of a spoon and dropped it into the bottom of a white bin-bag, where it lay, dried out and brown, as transparent as old human skin.”
― Mo Hayder, Pig Island

“Because ignorance, as I’d got tired of hearing, is no excuse for evil.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“Só porque o Turner usa aquele estilo manhoso depois das seis da tarde. Lollapalooza julga que é porreiro andar descalça e eu tenho uma cadela labrador no meu escritório, isso não significa que pode baixar os seus padrões.”
― Mo Hayder, Gone

“Wine?" said Zoe. "At two in the afternoon?"

"I've decided to become an alcoholic. Just for the duration of my middle years." She filled a glass and rested it on the edge of the washbasin. "That's yours.”
― Mo Hayder, Hanging Hill

“Everyone hates him. Me – I think I can see the sun shine when he bends over.”
― Mo Hayder, Pig Island

“Don’t ever try to change her,’ my mother said, before she died. ‘The tusks of an elephant will never grow out of a dog’s mouth. You know that.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“Sometimes people forget to be sympathetic and instead they blame you for everything, even for the things you did when you had no idea they were wrong.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“It’s wrong. I know, it’s wrong to give up. But sometimes life just seems to be going on for such a long time.” The”
― Mo Hayder, The Treatment

“That evening Jack sat at his desk in Ewan's room, gazing at the Windows 98 clouds on the screen.”
― Mo Hayder, Birdman

“Maybe you’re never really aware of the ones who are looking out for you until they’re gone.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“halyard on a boat moored somewhere out”
― Mo Hayder, Pig Island

“Maybe all truths are in us at birth. Maybe for years all we do is swim away from what we already know, and maybe only old age and death allow us to swim back, back to something that is pure, something unchanged by the act of surviving.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“There’s no reason for anyone to want to take her away from us. No reason at all. We’re just not that sort of family.”
― Mo Hayder, Gone

“Was it possible, he wondered, that every human is sentenced to a particular lifelong exercise of will, with a duty to accept it with grace and strength?”
― Mo Hayder, Birdman

“The past has transforming energy. The energy of wind or fire. We need to have respect for something so destructive. And you are asking to walk straight into it without a thought? It is a dangerous land. You have to be sure that you want to go ahead.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“Turn your face to the sun, my boy. Remember that life is short. Always turn your face to the sun when you have the chance.”
― Mo Hayder, The Devil of Nanking

“I'm a post-menopausal woman who's lived in a man's world for twenty years. A more cynical, cruel creature it's hard to find.”
― Mo Hayder, Hanging Hill

“Back when she was a child. Back when everything was possible and there was still hope. Still so much hope in the world.”
― Mo Hayder, Gone

“You can be brave and confident as you like, you can convince yourself that you’re invulnerable, that you know what you’re dealing with. You think that it won’t ever really get too serious--that there’ll be some kind of a warning before it goes that far, danger music, maybe, playing offstage, the way you get in films. But it seems to me that disasters aren’t like that. Disasters are life’s great ambushers: they have a way of jumping on you when your eyes are fixed on something else.”
― Mo Hayder

“African witchcraft?’ Kaiser peered over his glasses as if Caffery was a mystery. ‘I’m not sure which of those two words is the most ignorant and patronizing. To describe a deep-seated cultural belief as ‘witchcraft’ or to apply the universal label ‘African’ instead of using the name of a tribe or, at the very least, a country. Even if the concept of a country is a colonialist construct, it’s better than giving them all one title – ‘African’.”
― Mo Hayder, Ritual

“The Christian Church,’ he went on, ‘tries to pretend it doesn’t exist. But other religions aren’t so coy – the ancient religions, I mean, the ones born out of passion and intelligence, an understanding of the earth and the way the seasons move, not the ones spread and imposed through politics and imperialism.”
― Mo Hayder, Ritual

“He’s in trouble, Rebecca, genuine, no-fucking-around trouble.”
― Mo Hayder, Birdman

“brother had done. He pushes the boots to one side and”
― Mo Hayder, Poppet

“Penny is thankful of nature, of the generous and non-judgemental way it orbits and replenishes itself, regardless of humanity and the stupid shit mankind tries.”
― Mo Hayder, Poppet