Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder > Recent Status Updates

I said, “No thank you,” giving as my reason the higher educational standards to be found in the public school system then. But you, Dear Reader, will divine the truth: a school full of girls and nothing but girls was my idea of the Ninth Circle of Hell. I’d had too much experience of their menacing powers back in Grade Four. That experience was buried deep in my psyche; but, like a vampire, it was still alive.

Possibly you will never entirely trust anyone. You will be endlessly wondering about hidden motives and secret agendas. You will know that there are likely to be at least two stories: the one you’re being told, and the other one. You might become a detective. You might become a con artist yourself. Or, a blend of the two: you might become a novelist.

You’re a writer, aren’t you, a poet? It isn’t enough for you to meddle in other people’s lives, to get them arrested, to see them sent to prison, their lives broken. You have to understand them, get into their minds, use them as your raw material. But you can’t use me. You haven’t the right.

For AD the greatest danger in a criminal investigation, particularly for murder, remained the same. It was the too easy fixing on a prime suspect, the concentration of effort to prove him guilty to the neglect of other lines of inquiry, and the inevitable corruption of judgement which made the team unable to contemplate that they might be wrong.

Anyone who thinks that females are perfect, that girls are nicer, that every sadistic thing girls and women do is the fault of “the patriarchy,” has either forgotten a lot or never been a nine-year-old girl at school. The desire for power is a human constant, though the ways of demonstrating this desire change according to circumstances.

Kui sina oled 18 ja teine on 25, siis on see väga suur vahe. Selle kohta on arhitekt Jüri Okasel ilus lause, et kõik üle 40-aastased inimesed on ühevanused. Teistpidi jälle: kunagi ma lugesin üks Faulkneri intervjuud kus ta ütles, et alla 40-aastased inimesed on väga harva sümpaatsed. Muidugi on ka vastupidiseid näiteid, aga seda on ikka harva.

I remembered some words I’d read written by a philosopher, I think Roger Scruton. ‘The consolation of imaginary things is not imaginary consolation.’

He was, after all, a poet with a writer’s interest in the fabric of other lives. His poetry was a mystery to her. The man who had produced A Case to Answer and Other Poems bore no relation to the senior detective she served under with a passionate commitment.

The revolution had substantial successes in the south, and real victories in the Caucasus. January 1906 was a month of firing-squads. Punitive expeditions restored order everywhere with a cold ferocity. In the Baltic provinces, Siberia and the Caucasus they sowed the seeds of terrible hatreds.

For a limited time only! Management gets a huge kick out of that catchphrase. Oracle has two main departments: Past and Futures. Including Vik and me, there are probably fifty employees in Past, and I have no idea how many in Futures ... Most of them, we’ll never meet, because they haven’t even been hired yet.

Starkadr was said to have hailed from Estonia. As Saxo Grammaticus wrote in the late 12th century: in ea regione que Sveciam ab oriente complectitur, quamque nunc Estonum […] sedibus tenet originem duxisse.

[in that region which embraces Sweden to the east, and which is now home to the Estonians […], he holds to have originated.]

Dalgliesh thought, Hasn’t it always been like this? People tell me things. I don’t need to probe or question, they tell. It had begun when he was a young detective sergeant and then it had surprised and intrigued him, feeding his poetry, bringing the half-shameful realization that for a detective it would be a useful gift.

She thought of faces as being either softly moulded or carved. His was carved. It was a handsome authoritative face and the dark eyes that looked into hers were kindly. He had an attractive voice, and voices had always been important to her. And then she remembered Muriel’s words. The police believe nothing, that’s the way they’re trained to think.

The iron contained in the Kaali meteorite, about 450 tonnes, was of immense value, totalling more than the entire world's annual iron production. We might assume that attitudes towards Saaremaa changed with the dawn of the Iron Age: notions of terror and catastrophe were complemented with fairy tale-like themes of wealth, ultimately blending and overwhelming the earlier reputation.

Another of my stuffed animals was a giraffe, covered with strange pink wartime oilcloth. Why was his name Squirrely? Search me. During a motorboat trip, Squirrely went overboard ... But the next spring, there was Squirrely, floating in the lake and not much the worse for his ordeal.
Narratives could change. Disasters could be reversed. Redemption was possible. The dead could live again. Miracles could happen.

He had no great interest in technology, requiring only that it should work efficiently. If a machine broke down he replaced it with a different model since money was less important than saving time and avoiding the frustration of argument. The telephone he hated. It was in the hall and he seldom answered it, preferring to listen to the recorded messages every evening.

From all quarters of the capital the petitioners, carrying icons and singing hymns, set off marching through the snow, late on a January morning, to see their ‘little father, the Tsar’. At every cross-road armed ambushes were waiting for them. The soldiers machine-gunned them down and the Cossacks charged them. ‘Treat them like rebels’ had been the Emperor’s command.

Every writer is at least two beings: the one who lives and the one who writes. Every question and answer session at a book event is an illusion. It's the one doing the living, not the one doing the writing who is present on such occasions. How could the writer be there, since no writing is being done at that moment? Like Jekyll and Hyde ...

[from the Introduction, actually page xix]

You were such a sensitive child!
- My Mother
But I'm quite flinty now.
- Me
Yes. You are.
- My Daughter
One of these days that smart mouth of yours is going to get you in trouble.
- My father, when I was a teenager

[from the epigraph, actually page ix]

“You have, Commander, something of the air of a man who feels that he is at last making progress. Some might say, About time. Let us hope it doesn’t all end in the Slough of Despond.”

She said, “I had a boyfriend, a librarian who tried to get me to enjoy Henry James. By the time I’d got to the end of a sentence I’d forgotten how it began. Remember that criticism, some writers bite off more than they can chew; Henry James chews more than he’s bitten off?”

[literary criticism from Detective Inspector Kate Miskin]

Six lines of verse came into his mind and he took a page of paper, ripped it in half and wrote them down:

Epitaph for a Dead Poet
Buried at last who was so wise,
Six foot by three in clay he lies.
Where no hands reach, where no lips move,
Where no voice importunes his love.
How odd he cannot know nor see
This last fine self-sufficiency.

I suppose even Dalgliesh doesn’t seriously suspect any of our fathers-in-God, although he’s probably keeping them in mind, particularly if he remembers his Pascal. ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’

Baltic Finns’ relationship to snakes is conspicuously contradictory and does not seem to fit the global myths in which a snake represents evil, downfall, and death. Instead, Baltic-Finnic folklore reveals a friendly and tenderly caring attitude towards the reptiles. Snake worship persisted in Estonia until the 20th century,

The thought sparked off another, even more disgracefully irreverent thought. What would Lady Macbeth have said to Duncan’s widow had that lady come to Inverness Castle to view the body? “A deplorable affair, madam, which my husband and I deeply regret. It was a most successful visit until then. We did all we could to make His Majesty comfortable.”

there came to him a conviction that was as powerful as it was seemingly irrational: that the three deaths were connected. The apparent suicide, the certified natural death, the brutal murder—there was a cord which connected them. Its strength might be tenuous and its path convoluted, but when he had traced it, it would lead him to the heart of the mystery.