Harry Bingham > Quotes

“...if it's cool you're after, then you're knock-knock-knocking on the wrong door. My maximum ambition is to make it to normal.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“Accountants come in pairs these days. A middle-aged man in a dark suit and a sheen of perspiration, plus his younger accomplice, a woman who looks like her hobbies are arranging things in rows and making right angles.”
― Harry Bingham

“These are tears and I am crying.
It is not a painful sensation, as I always thought it must be. It feels like the purest expression of feeling that it is possible to have. And the feeling mixes everything up together. Happiness. Sadness. Relief. Sorrow. Love. A mixture if things no psychiatrist ever felt. It is the most wonderful mixture in the world.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“People never really reinvent themselves. They migrate back to whatever they truly were.”
― Harry Bingham, This Thing of Darkness

“It’s no good living in a world at peace if your own head is at war with itself.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“There are times when your body takes control. Times when the gazelle says, ‘Fuck you, lioness,’ and delivers the biggest kick of its whole gazelley life.”
― Harry Bingham

“I'm not good with hospitals. The endless buildings, trees dotted around like apologies, and inside, it's job functions you can't understand and that air of incomprehensible busyness. Curtained-off beds and death settling like falling snow.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“Never assume they know what you fear they know.”
― Harry Bingham, The Lieutenant's Lover

“I like the structure of the crime story, but most of all I like the ecosystem in which the genre flourishes: the festivals, the websites, the fans, the fact that you have your own special section of the bookshop. And crime is cool, too. It’s dark and edgy and funny and intelligent. I love it.”
― Harry Bingham

“I avoid doing things on impulse, because I’ve learned that my feelings are too unreliable to trust.”
― Harry Bingham, This Thing of Darkness

“How do you conceal a secret? With openness.”
― Harry Bingham, Love Story, With Murders

“Neither of us say anything. She doesn’t need a doctor or a couple of intrusive coppers. She needs a time machine. She needs to go back to the age of eight or nine, or earlier. Back to being a newborn. She needs different parents, a different upbringing, a different past. She needs to be on a completely different planet in a completely different life. No matter which way you read the signs on this one, she’s riding hard for an unhappy ending. Through the wall, we can hear Jane on the”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“When, finally, I go into the office, I experience that weirdness I always get when I've been away any length of time. Weirded out by the normality. The way life without me seems to have been much the same as life with me, only presumably more peaceful and with slightly worse grammar.”
― Harry Bingham, The Deepest Grave

“There was a posh girl in my year at Cambridge, also a philosopher, who gave names to every significant possession in her life. She had a teddy bear, of course, but her car had a name too. So did her phone. So did both of her laptops and her camera. For all I know, she gave names to her knives and forks as well - I don't know how far these things go with the English aristocracy.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“Yes, sir. I went downstairs to' - a blurry moment when no words come to me, then it passes and I continue - 'to pursue my investigations further. I sought to liberate the women I found, but they were secured with chains.'

Jackson nods. I'm doing well. 'And you weren't able to call for help, because...'

'Because of the women on the boat. If Sikorsky's men had heard police sirens, the women could have been tossed overboard immediately. I had to let those men come to me, so I could...um...'

Shoot the fuckers.

'Arrest them,' says Jackson.

'Exactly. So I could arrest them.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“To have your face rolled down over your eyes and not even to notice your blindness. That's dead, I think, as dead as it's possible to be.”
― harry bingham, This Thing of Darkness

“Buzz and Dad are talking about a rugby player called Jones. I listen in for a while, but there seem to be at least four different Joneses in question, which seems excessive, even by Welsh standards.”
― Harry Bingham, Love Story, With Murders

“Writing is a hard industry. Whether you’re conventionally published or indie or whether (like me) a mixture of the two, it’s a tough way to make a living. The simple truth is that most books don’t sell very many copies and most good books don’t sell very many either. That fact isn’t going to change – and the price of books isn’t suddenly going to skyrocket – so any writer just needs to accept that this is a hard way to earn a buck. My instinct is still to advise writers, if they can, do get a literary agent and get an advance from a regular publisher. Easier said than done!”
― Harry Bingham

“Then I stare at my face in the mirror for a minute or two, wondering if it feels like mine. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the dark count is invisible in mirrors and I often feel something similar is true of me too. I can’t feel any deep relationship between the face that is mine and the person I am. Like they’re two different things. I don’t”
― Harry Bingham, Love Story, With Murders

“Did your mam get those tulips? I sent them. I felt bad.'

'Yes, she did. Thank you for that.'

'OK...' Don't know how to answer that. I stole his phone. He hit me. I bought his mam tulips. It's hard to work out who owes whom exactly.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“Fi. That's 'if' backwards.

Griffiths. Nice ordinary name, but two more 'if's lurking at the heart of it. My name, literally, is as iffy as you can get. The only solid sound, the only one you can actually hang on to, is that opening G, and it's not to be trusted.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“A grey pigeon flies with heavy wing beats across the yard. It sits on the low wall bounding the pig-sties and tries to remember what it came for.”
― Harry Bingham, The Dead House

“A lot of heroin overdose isn’t overdose at all. It’s the same dose as normal, but taken in an unfamiliar setting, it overrides the body’s homeostatic”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“and I can make him smile. And smiles are precious.”
― Harry Bingham, This Thing of Darkness

“There are only two ways a person can die. Their heart or their lungs.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“it’s an all-hands-on-deck affair.’ ‘And he wants my hand on his deck.’ ‘He does indeed.”
― Harry Bingham, Talking to the Dead

“living in the same house, married to the same woman, doing the same things in the same way until arthritis stiffened him, cataracts dimmed him, muscles failed and cancers ate him.”
― Harry Bingham, This Thing of Darkness

“detritus of”
― Harry Bingham, The Dead House

“One of those thick red carpets that seems to trap time. I have one”
― Harry Bingham, This Thing of Darkness

“Experimenting later, in a coffee shop toilet, I discover that I have acquired a couple of raking-tools-cum-hairgrips. Also a tube of mascara: something called Glam'Eyes Lash Flirt, a product which would attract me more had it been less reckless with its apostrophe.”
― Harry Bingham, The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths