36 Quotes by R.J. Ellory

It was the old saw: Family and money – trouble when you got it, trouble when you ain’t.

He smiled to himself. Dreamers, he thought. Pair of foolish dreamers. And he knew – somehow he just knew – that it had to get better from here.

Everything he said seemed to be a judgment, an ultimatum, a handful of words from a sermon about fortitude, resilience, persistence, and unwillingness to quit. His slant was dark, pessimistic, but there was a sober level to it that Bailey found reassuring and practical. Emanuel Smith was a dreamer. He’d watched his dreams die, but that hadn’t changed his belief in the dreams. Like her father. He was dead, but that didn’t mean he’d never lived.

His heart was too heavy to bear. He felt the weight of conscience, the weight of responsibility, the weight of fraternity.

He cried for the future, and he cried because of the past.

He questioned the present, the past, and he realized that life had a way of preparing you for nothing at all.

Afraid of the present, the uncertain future, more afraid of the past, for the past he could not change and everything from this point forward could have been predetermined by circumstances beyond his control.

The thing Clay saw, the thing he now understood, was that the darkness of man was not an illusion. Men and women – the bold and the brave, the anxious, the timid, the poor, the wealthy, the sincere and the shallow – all hoped that evil was an illusion, but it was not.

Dead from emotional boredom, Maurice said, and Margot smiled and said nothing despite the fact that she knew Maurice was more than likely right. If a life has no purpose then it finds a way to stop living.