Merryn Allingham > Quotes

“There was the offer of a new challenge - you could go stale doing the same thing over and over - and being in daily contact with young, creative minds could only be invigorating”
― Merryn Allingham, The Library Murders

“When he'd called Flora impossible, he hadn't been wrong. Once she got an idea into her head, it stuck. She was like a terrier digging for a rabbit, and it was tough luck on anyone who got in the way”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at the Priory Hotel

“The mystery had grown too intriguing to be given up to the police. It was one that belonged to them”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at Primrose Cottage

“It happens, boys get led along the wrong path and before you know it, the police are involved. But Shane has turned his life around so one must be generous”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at the Priory Hotel

“True, I suppose, but when you live in a place all your life, you don't always see its beauty. Or you see it, but somehow look through it.”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder in a French Village

“His son's success as a novelist seemed to have passed Ralph by. To his father, Jack had let his heart rule his head, allowed heartbreak to destroy a successful career in order to waste his time scribbling. When was he going back to a proper job, a return to quality journalism?”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at Primrose Cottage

“He strode southwards through the maze of small streets, remembering the way from when he'd come to live with his father as a teenage boy, the surplus adolescent Ralph hadn't wanted”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at St. Saviour's

“It was lunchtime the next day and Flora was already looking forward to the evening - an early supper and several hours of reading by the fire. April was still cold enough to put a match to the logs she'd stacked in the fireplace and enjoy the smell of apple wood. Enjoy, too, the latest Ian Fleming to arrive at the All's Well, 'From Russia With Love'. She couldn't approve of his hero, but the books were wonderfully exciting”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at Abbeymead Farm

“He wanted to put his arms around her and hug her tight, but common sense told him that would be stupid and common sense triumphed”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“She had been with Violet throughout the unequal battle and, when it was over, had felt so exhausted, so wrung out by sorrow and fatigue,”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“I loved my job but even jobs you love can pall.”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“He was itching to make a start on the book that, in his mind, he'd begun to put together and for that he needed to be back at Overlay House. A writer's dilemma, he thought drily. Torture while you were actually writing and frustration when you weren't”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder in a French Village

“This new development in Flora's life was a test, if anything was. But she was her own woman, he'd always known that, and if he didn't like it, he should never have fallen in love with her”
― Merryn Allingham, The Library Murders

“The inspector held a grudging admiration for Flora's detective skills but persisted in seeing her as 'Jack's little girl' and treating her in much the same manner”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at St. Saviour's

“I don’t care. They are wonderful stories.”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at Primrose Cottage

“People didn't speak of the war, particularly men who had fought their way across Europe. They barely mentioned what had happened to them in those long years of struggle. No one did, really. It was as though a huge schism had broken the country apart - a second appalling conflagration within thirty years - and everyone was now silently trying to knit the edges together”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“I love the way you construct an entire story out of so little. You really should be a writer, Flora”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder on the Pier

“She shouldn't have spoken the thought that was in her mind but, as so often in the past, she'd allowed emotion to overwhelm a wiser approach”
― Merryn Allingham, The Library Murders

“Six years ago, Jack's heart had been well and truly broken but, in fleeing back to England, he'd hoped he might leave the past behind. He'd settled in Sussex, buried himself deep in the countryside and erected a fence around a period of his life he'd no wish to remember. That had been the theory. The practice had turned out rather differently. He'd found forgetting impossible, the memories an itch he'd continually had to scratch, desperately wanting but never quite able to lose them. And every so often, that itch, that desperation, grew harder, wilder, and writing became almost impossible”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder on the Pier

“Writers had all the time in the world, it seemed, but shopkeepers didn't”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at Abbeymead Farm

“There are too many oddities, Jack. Too many arbitrary events. Usually by this stage, one or two strands are beginning to make sense, but not this time. It seems as though anything might happen at any time. It's making me feel unsafe”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at Abbeymead Farm

“Two separate deliveries from the warehouse arrived early, filling what little empty space the shop possessed and needed to be unpacked as soon as possible. Scissoring open the first box, she breathed in the bookishness of its contents. This was a moment she always savoured: the touch of smooth covers, the smell of print, the solidity of pages beneath her hand”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at the Priory Hotel

“Yet the excitement in edging closer to the truth was undeniable, and for the first time in many years, he had a strong sense of living in the world rather than through the characters he created”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“For nearly three years, Flora had cared for the person who was dearest to her. Those years had passed in a daze, with no time ever to think, some days not even time to change her clothes or brush her hair, helping Violet stay on at the All’s Well while running between cottage and bookshop: shopping, cleaning, serving customers, organising medicine, doing the hundred small things that had to be done for an invalid.”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“But Jack yearned for real progress, hating the feeling of being stuck, of drowning in the stodge of a puzzle that became more unfathomable by the day”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at the Priory Hotel

“Those years had passed in a daze, with no time ever to think, some days not even time to change her clothes or brush her hair, helping Violet stay on at the All’s Well while running between cottage and bookshop: shopping, cleaning, serving customers, organising medicine, doing the hundred small things that had to be done for an invalid. It had been a sad time, but Flora had never regretted it.”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“Her family, my father's family, came from London. That's where she was brought up and lived her younger years. She never liked the city, though. Said that life there felt anonymous, detached. Villages are very different. You can't be detached in a village and somehow she felt more at home here”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder on the Pier

“The knowledge of the world is contained within, that’s the library’s message – one cherub holding a book, and the other a globe.”
― Merryn Allingham, The Bookshop Murder

“Their friendship had been a lesson to him in the way, even now, society so often dismissed women - at best queens of the kitchen and, at worst, fluffy nonentities. His mother, though neither fluffy nor a kitchen queen, had proved no different.”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder in a French Village

“Don’t mock, Jolyon. I may not always think in a straight line, but I usually get there.”
― Merryn Allingham, Murder at the Priory Hotel