Ruth Rendell > Quotes

“Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.”
― Ruth Rendell, One Across, Two Down

“I really do literally put myself into a character's shoes.”
― Ruth Rendell

“The knives of jealousy are honed on details.”
― Ruth Rendell

“Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to.”
― Ruth Rendell

“Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one's other self listening.”
― Ruth Rendell

“...selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.”
― Ruth Rendell, Live Flesh

“You make someone into a object of – not so much of pity as of weakness, sickness, stupidity, inefectiveness, do you see what I mean? You hit them for their stupidity and their inability to respond, and when you’ve hurt them, marked them, they’re even more sick and ugly, aren’t they? And they’re afraid and cringing too. Oh, I know this isn’t very pleasant, but you did ask.”
“Go on” he said.
“So you’ve got a frightened, stupid, even disabled person, silenced, made ugly, and what can you do with someone like that, someone who’s unworthy of being treated well? You treat them badly because that’s what they deserve. One thinks of poor little kids that no one love because they’re dirty, sovered in snot and shit, and always screaming. So you beat them because they’re hateful, they’re low, they’re sub-human. That’s all they’re good for, being hit, being reduced even further.”
― Ruth Rendell, Simisola

“She wasn't there. He wouldn't have had to look too closely. She stood out from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer.”
― Ruth Rendell, Thirteen Steps Down

“Don’t hate anyone,” she had said. “It’s quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Girl Next Door

“She didn't really know London, only lived in it.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Water's Lovely

“You couldn’t love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?”
― Ruth Rendell

“I don't judge people. I don't think we should/”
― Ruth Rendell

“People are different in reality from the way you've seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they're less consistent. They surprise you all the time.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Water's Lovely

“People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Sight for Sore Eyes

“The sensations he had were shared by many of the young, poor and beautiful: how unfair it was that they should be denied benefits which the old and ugly enjoyed.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Sight for Sore Eyes

“I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden".”
― Ruth Rendell

“There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematicians that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one …”
― Ruth Rendell, Shake Hands Forever

“The admonitions of those who seldom remonstrate are more effective than the commands of naggers.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone

“I kill, therefore I am.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Killing Doll

“They remained the same and could be an endless source of pleasure and satisfaction. There might be people, or a person, of whom that was also true, but he had never, by the age of eighteen, come across any of them.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Sight for Sore Eyes

“Two years after Tolkien's The Hobbit was published I read it for the first time. Twenty years later I read it again and experienced just the same feeling of delight and happiness and a quite breathless pleasure. That first time, when I was nine, was also the first time I remember feeling this. It is a sensation known to all lovers of fiction and comes at about page two, when you know it's not only going to be good, but immensely satisfying, enthralling, not to be put down without resentment, drawing inexorably to a conclusion of power and dramatic soundness.”
― Ruth Rendell

“To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.”
― Ruth Rendell

“Burden thought irrelevantly that Wendy Williams must be attracted by bald men, first Rodney with his exaggerated forehead, naked as an apple, then this pebble-head.”
― Ruth Rendell, An Unkindness of Ravens

“His school had been so committed to establishing equality that the staff told a pupil he or she had done well only if they could tell every other member of the class the same thing.”
― Ruth Rendell, A Sight for Sore Eyes

“I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot ...”
― Ruth Rendell, The Killing Doll

“They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.”
― Ruth Rendell, The Girl Next Door