“I fared better than many of the people I wrote about in this book; yet even so, over the course of the events depicted here, I lost the person I cared for most. The war didn't get her; it got me.”

“It is now 55 years since my last book report, which is a long time to live with a guilty conscience. So here it is: In the spring of 1956 I wrote a highly favorable review of the Bible without reading a word of it, and it was the last A I ever got in English. Why it has taken so long to come clean I'm not sure, except I have always been extremely sensitive about my academic reputation.”

“Morse stared morosely at the blotting paper. "It's just not my sort of case, Lewis. I know it's not a very nice thing to say, but I just get on better when we've got a body - a body that died from unnatural causes. That's all I ask. And we haven't got a body.”

“A newspaper story, like anything else, is more attractive from a distance, when it first comes to you, than it is when you get in close and agonize over the details. Which I presume is how Yardley got in the habit of keeping himself at a distance.”

“I was tired in ways that had nothing to do with sleep. It occurred to me, sitting in the car with her, that I had been trying to hold too many things together that were meant to fall apart.”

“I'm never bored. Only people bore me, so I avoid them”

“But even though she was wise beyond her years, she was still young, and so was I, and all of our words were drowned out by the noise of our beating hearts, screaming at us that we were, after all, creatures of flesh and blood.”