Reginald Hill > Quotes

“So what to do? . . . She shook her head impatiently. Choice is a largely delusional concept, her tutor used to say. Whether in politics, morals or shopping, we have far less than we imagine. In the end what we have to do often doesn't even figure on our list of pseudo-options.”
― Reginald Hill

“then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven.”
― Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height

“His attitude to physical clues was rather like that of the modern Christian to miracles. They could happen, but probably not just at the moment.”
― Reginald Hill, An April Shroud

“Sorry?" said Dalziel turning. "What's that you said?"
He cupped a large hand to a proportionally large ear.
If the buggers get clever, he had once told Pascoe, pretend you can't hear. Then pretend you can't understand. Nothing's funny if it's repeated and explained.”
― Reginald Hill, An Advancement of Learning

“The pain of ignorance can end. The pain of knowledge is forever”
― Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height

“Twelve strangers," he interrupted, "twelve citizens picked off the street. In this world we're unfortunate to live in, and especially in this septic isle we live on,where squalid politicians conspire with the squalid press to feed a half-educated and wholly complacent public on a diet of meretricious trivia, I'm sure it would be possible to concoct enough evidence to persuade twelve strangers that Nelson Mandela was a cannibal.”
― Reginald Hill, The Woodcutter

“his head bowed over a typewriter with the rapt concentration of a chimpanzee wondering how best to start Hamlet.”
― Reginald Hill, Bones and Silence

“I’m sorry,” repeated Dree sincerely. “That’s OK. Don’t think of it as losing a sister-in-law, think of it as gaining a parasite. This soup’s delicious. I may sting you for another bowlful.”
― Reginald Hill, Who Guards a Prince?

“Then the incredible thought occurred to him that this slab of Cambrian rock was actually blushing! It was like dawn on a slag heap.”
― Reginald Hill, Killing the Lawyers

“Either you did things his way now, or you did them his way a little later.”
― Reginald Hill, Pictures of Perfection

“Boxers are simple men, a condition refined by frequent blows about the head, and though they are generally indifferent to appeals to their better nature or the higher aesthetic, the one way of catching their interest is to make complimentary remarks about their ring technique.”
― Reginald Hill, The Roar Of The Butterflies

“And neither yet understanding that a path is not a prospectus and that it may, in the instant it takes for a word to be spoken or a finger-hold to be lost, slip right off your map and lead you somewhere unimagined in all your certainties.”
― Reginald Hill, The Stranger House

“existence was like a huge Persian carpet. Looked at from close up, your little square might just seem a mess, but stand back far enough and you’d see for sure it was all one carefully patterned weave. Trouble was, like a photographer on a cliff, it was hard to get the right focus without falling off. But”
― Reginald Hill, Born Guilty

“Then Miss Turner noticed Rosie was a bit hot and flushed. Probably only the start of a summer cold.”
― Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height

“Make friends unless you feel strong enough to make enemies”
― Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height

“The first course was a portion of smoked mackerel hardly large enough for a single bite, which was what the Reverend gave it, ramming it down his throat with a bread roll, like a musketeer loading his gun.”
― Reginald Hill, Singing the Sadness

“It contained, rather squashed but not beyond recognition, a custard tart. “Oh shit,” said Pascoe. And suddenly, for some reason beyond reason, the barrier he’d been erecting both consciously and unconsciously between himself and the events in Mill Street crumbled like the walls of number 3, and when the nurse looked in to check that all was well, she found him with his face buried in his pillow, sobbing convulsively.”
― Reginald Hill, Death Comes For The Fat Man

“My gran always said, complaining loses old friends and doesn’t make new,’ she replied.”
― Reginald Hill, Singing the Sadness

“That’s right, I’m the driver. I just follow directions. You know so much, why don’t you tell me where to go, Reverend?’ ‘If I wasn’t a man of the cloth, I might just do that, brother,’ thundered Rev. Pot.”
― Reginald Hill, Singing the Sadness

“He was full of the glossy self-regard of men who shrugged off their importance in a way that only emphasized it.”
― Reginald Hill, On Beulah Height

“But Dalziel, when he went it would be like losing a mountain. Every time you saw the space where it had been, you’d be reminded nothing was forever, that even the very majesty of nature was only smoke and mirrors.”
― Reginald Hill, Death Comes For The Fat Man

“Now the drift seemed to him like a well-lit road. It was his fate, it seemed, to search for the tunnel at the end of the light.”
― Reginald Hill, Underworld

“The van bore the single word BREAKDOWN like a command, and its engine coughed asthmatically as if eager to obey.”
― Reginald Hill, Singing the Sadness

“and we are to each other for ever what was bearable only in my intuition of its impermanence. Death doesn’t change things, then. It merely petrifies things for those who go on living.”
― Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman

“Oh, the youth of the heart and the dew in the morning, you wake and they’ve left you without any warning.”
― Reginald Hill, One Small Step

“Fidler himself was a personable young man who’d been a New Labor MP till “the sheer meaningless gab of it” had driven him to resign and spend more time with his money by becoming a TV personality.”
― Reginald Hill, Death Comes For The Fat Man

“Joe had experienced plenty of being put in his place, which he paid little heed to on the grounds that he found his place so very much to his liking that he had no notion of trying to get out of it.”
― Reginald Hill, The Roar Of The Butterflies

“One of Dalziel's dicta for police and public was, if you can't be honest you'd better be fucking clever.”
― Reginald Hill, Child's Play

“coruscating”
― Reginald Hill, A Pinch of Snuff

“We’re turning into a geriatric society. The old are fighting back. They have the great advantage of an irresistible recruitment programme. It’s called living.”
― Reginald Hill, Deadheads