Reginald Hill

"When we dead awake it will be to each of us as if but a second ago we had felt the pangs of dying, the explosion in the head, the drowning of the lungs, the fingers tightening around the throat. What a noise of screaming and wailing there will be at that moment! … Silence and amazement as we realise pain is no more … and then the onset of such a fear at the strangeness and uncertainty of this awakening that as we remember forever that unattainable past - sunlight… sea … the pleasures of mind and appetite, even the pains of dying - will seem more desirable to us than all the fabled joys of immortality. Even your lonely, frightened and unhappy existence will beckon you backward with siren song Dalziel. Even that Dalziel. Even that ..."

Reginald Hill

Anaïs Nin

"The leaf fall of his words, the stained glass hues of his moods, the rust in his voice, the smoke in his mouth, his breath on my vision like human breath blinding a mirror."

"There are two ways to reach me: by way of kisses or by way of the imagination. But there is a hierarchy: the kisses alone don't work."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive."

"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."

"Life is truly known only to those who suffer, lose, endure adversity, & stumble from defeat to defeat."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."

"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women, to enter ordinary relationships, I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic- in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."