212 Quotes by Ruth Rendell

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

I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot...

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?

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.

Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd.

The trouble with psychology,” said Wexford epigrammatically, ’is that it doesn’t take human nature into account.

He would have to get used to it, she thought. He would have to get used to her being more and more preoccupied with books.

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.

He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a woodpecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was.