Home > Work > Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales
1 " A successful murder depends on knowing your victim, "
― P.D. James , Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales
2 " The young seldom lie convincingly. They haven’t had time to practise like the rest of us. "
3 " Unmarried, solitary, unsociable; why should I expect my writing to be any more successful than my life? "
4 " To collect me. That is what we can so easily be made to feel at seventy-three; an object, not exactly precious but likely to be brittle, to be carefully collected, conscientiously cared for and as conscientiously returned. "
5 " The essential self is fixed well before the thirteenth birthday. It may be influenced by experience but it is seldom changed. "
6 " Never say you know the last word about any human heart. "
7 " But Henry said firmly that the combination of Christmas pudding and violent death would be intolerably indigestible; the pudding would keep until next year. "
8 " And with that touch the memories came flooding back. The verb is trite but accurate; they came like a full tide, sweeping me back to the same day sixty years ago, December 23rd 1936, the day of the murder. "
9 " Memory is always disjointed, episodic. Some impulse of the mind presses the button and, like a colour transparency, the picture is suddenly thrown on the screen, vivid, immobile, a glowing instant fixed in time between the long stretches of dark emptiness "
10 " Not with arsenic, of course. Only a cad would use arsenic. That’s the weapon of suburban poisoners and Victorian adulteresses. "
