Deborah James Quotes

Fangs are more pointed, and vampires use fangs to bite people on the neck.' 'Yech! Who'd want to do that?' 'Vampires would, that's who.' 'Wait a minute. I saw Mrs. Monroe bite Mr. Monroe on the neck once. Does that mean she's a vampire?' 'Boy, are you dumb. She's not a vampire. She's a lawyer.

We late-lamented, resting here, Are mixed to human jam, And each to each exclaims in fear, ‘I know not which I am!’ ” —Thomas Hardy, “The Levelled Churchyard,” 1882

early 1990s, Deborah Tannen, a linguist at Georgetown University, attracted international notice with her book You Just Don’t Understand. Her book, which was on the New York Times bestseller list for over four years, argued that men and women often talk past each other without appreciating that the other sex is almost another culture. Women, for example, are highly attentive to the thoughts and feelings of others; men are less so. Women view men’s speaking styles as blunt and uncaring; men view women’s as indirect and obscure.

You can only do things one day at a time, sport. Sometimes life is so bloody that's the only way you can get through it. But the good bit about living one day at a time is that when nice things happen, you enjoy them more than people who are always thinking about the past or the future.

After a moment, Callery shrugged. “We’ll go in, then, the two of us, with Weeping Myrtle here.” He nodded towards the café. “It’s Moaning Myrtle,” Kincaid corrected, feeling a flicker of surprise at Callery’s Harry Potter reference. He didn’t seem the fantasy type. And somehow he couldn’t imagine that this man had kids.

had been beautiful, and if God had not given her a spirit so demure, she might, with ironic gusto, have acted out that rape in the fields forever. Since she could not be considered a woman, she could only be looked on as a harlot, a source of delight more bestial and mysteries more shaking than any a proper woman could provide. Lust stirred in the eyes of men when they looked at Deborah, lust that could not be endured because it was so impersonal, limiting communion to

summit of Notting Hill, across the street from the faded elegance of St. John’s Church. Once Dawn had loved this Victorian house with its pale yellow stucco, its superbly proportioned rooms and beautiful appointments, and for a moment she mourned the passing of such an innocent pleasure. Tonight the windows were dark as she turned into the drive, the blank panes mirroring her car lights. She had managed to beat Karl home, then; she would have a few minutes’ respite. Turning off the engine, she reached for her parcels, then paused, squeezing her eyes shut.

Bureaucracy, politics, and the inability of public institutions to humbly acknowledge mistakes were all to blame. The two law enforcement agencies were biding their time, refusing comment on what they termed an ongoing joint investigation into the relationship between the murders of Alexandra Parks, James Allen, Peter and Paul Nguyen, and George Schubert. The slayings of Deborah Stovall and Josette Leroux, professionally known on the porno circuit as Ashley Juggs and Annie Minx, were also folded in as part of the joint investigation. All the while, Foster remained in the L.A. County Jail on a no-bail hold. The

Claudia Roden, and Paula Wolfert (Mediterranean), Diana Kennedy and Maricel Presilla (Mexico), Andy Ricker and David Thompson (Thailand), Andrea Nguyen and Charles Phan (Vietnam). For general cooking: James Beard, April Bloomfield, Marion Cunningham, Suzanne Goin, Edna Lewis, Deborah Madison, Cal Peternell, David Tanis, Alice Waters, The Canal House, and The Joy of Cooking. For inspiring writing about food and cooking: Tamar Adler, Elizabeth David, MFK Fisher, Patience Gray, Jane Grigson, and Nigel Slater. For baking: Josey Baker, Flo Braker, Dorie Greenspan, David Lebovitz, Alice Medrich, Elisabeth Prueitt, Claire Ptak, Chad Robertson, and Lindsey Shere.

She watched as he put a few ice cubes in a heavy glass, then expertly curled a strip of grapefruit rind from one of the fruits in a bowl on the bar top. "This must be a favorite," she commented, nodding at the supply of grapefruit nestled in the bowl along with the usual lemons and limes. He poured a generous measure from the black bottle and handed it to her with a cocktail napkin. "See for yourself." Gemma wasn't in the habit of drinking gin neat, so she sniffed, then took a tentative sip. The flavors exploded in her mouth- coriander and juniper and lime and... grapefruit. "Oh, wow," she said, when her eyes stopped watering. "That is amazing. I'm converted.

straight

Men often substitute anger for grief, because anger is the only emotion they’re taught it’s acceptable to feel.

What he wanted was his own small universe, house and garden, a world he could control, an order he could impose.

Kincaid wondered what universal formula required that a person should sit down to receive bad news. Was it merely a precaution against fainting or falling, or had it become a kind of foreshadowing, effective in easing the shock?

He said the words flatly, with an ease born of years of practice, yet it still amazed him that such simple sentences could contain such betrayal.

Please, please just enjoy life because it's so precious. All I want right now is more time and more life.

No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her feet, how they dance. A poor life this is if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.’ William Henry Davies

never did I realise more that the life I had been taking for granted would be the one thing I now desired above all else.

I was on autopilot – my career took precedence, my relationships came last,

only person watching them. She’d noticed that before with Colin. At large dinners, people a few seats down would stop eating and lean over to listen to him. Colin left James, and a moment later he appeared beside her with a bottle of wine and glasses for her and her father. He kissed Faye, checked his watch, and said, “When can we ask them all to leave?” “Well,” said Deborah, once the guests were gone. “That was a success.” She had arranged for them to borrow her friend’s house in Provence for their honeymoon. “Actually,” Faye had said, “we’re going to India.” And on their honeymoon a week later, in a coracle spinning on a river in Hampi, Faye gripped the straw edges of the boat and she laughed and laughed and laughed. — AFTER THEY WERE MARRIED, my parents often went on trips abroad with his friends, to rented villas in France, Sardinia, Mallorca. I visited the one in Mallorca when I was twenty-two, after saving for months to buy the ticket. I went in September, when the villa where they’d stayed was empty. A sign for a security system was posted

A curved bar partially divided the large front room. Behind it, a young woman with curly blond hair tied back with a red bandanna drew pints with cheerful efficiency. “What can I get for you?” she asked, smiling, as they reached the bar. “Just some information,” said Gemma, returning the smile and holding up her warrant card. The girl’s eyes widened. She glanced to either side, checking that

Izzy was white, a little chubby, with breasts already developing and clothes a bit tighter than Gemma thought appropriate. Her shoulder-length hair was dirty blond and she wore just a suspicion of makeup—the sort Gemma remembered wearing and thinking her mother wouldn’t notice. Her mother, of course, had made her go and scrub her face as soon as she caught sight of her.

When Gemma took the phone, she saw that the screen was slightly cracked. Even though the phone was obviously not new, she had to wonder at parents buying such an expensive gadget for a twelve-year-old. Just this year, they’d bought Kit a cheap phone with a limited number of texts, and he was fourteen.

Denis Childs hunched his shoulders as he walked into the unpleasant east wind. It was late in the year for an east wind—what was the old saying? An east wind blows no good? That would certainly be true tonight, he thought, tugging the lapels of his jacket together with a fist against his chest. The jacket’s tails flapped behind him like crow’s wings. He hadn’t had the time or the inclination to have many things altered, and his clothes hung loose as a scarecrow’s.

The man behind the counter was Middle Eastern, middle-aged, with a paunch hinting that he indulged in his own fare. But the apron over his expansive middle was clean, as was the serving counter and what Kincaid could see of the kitchen.

And she was a little surprised at how much she’d hated seeing MacKenzie so shocked and upset.

Childs sat back and finished the dregs of his tonic. Then he slid out of the booth with surprising grace for a big man. He stood for a moment, as if hesitating, then, with a last nod at Kincaid, made his way out of the bar.

All journalists stand on the shoulders of giants, whether they admit it or not. In many cases, my book was vastly enhanced by the superlative work of other journalists, writers, and financial historians, who have themselves explored some of the subjects and themes I have tried to knit together in one sweeping narrative. Peter Bernstein is a huge inspiration, and his books were of tremendous help for some of the earlier chapters, as was Colin Read’s The Efficient Market Hypothesists. Lewis Braham’s biography of Jack Bogle is essential reading for anyone interested in the tumultuous life of Vanguard’s founder. Ralph Lehman’s The Elusive Trade was exhaustively detailed on the genesis of ETFs, and Anthony Bianco’s The Big Lie vividly tells the story of WFIA/BGI in the Pattie Dunn era. I have also learned an enormous amount from working with or admiring from afar financial journalists like John Authers, Gillian Tett, James Mackintosh, Philip Coggan, and Jason Zweig, as well as industry experts such as Deborah Fuhr, Ben Johnson, Eric Balchunas, and David Nadig. They are all titans upon whose shoulders I nervously perch.

You knew,” Kincaid said, thinking of Childs’s increasingly sallow skin over the past few years. Of course. He’d been jaundiced. And he had been losing weight for at least a year before his sudden leave. “The slimming. I thought it was for your health.” “It was for my health,” Childs agreed, “although perhaps not in the usual sense. Excess weight complicates any surgery and recovery.

He took credit, a little guiltily, for Doug’s findings

toxic, white phosphorous, and I

Gemma murmured. Even if she could afford Stella’s

said, “before you have your wicked way with me. I’m Tommy Godwin, by the way.” “So I’d gathered,” retorted Gemma, escaping gratefully to the loo. Once safely behind the closed

pugnacious.

the willows, whose drooping fronds reached out to touch their own reflections.

support,” he added, gesturing at his ankle,

But in this case,” he continues, tracing the line of the plasterwork with one finger, “I feel that there is one cliché that sums up my position so admirably that it would be pure egotism to attempt a more interesting periphrasis. Plain speaking, therefore, there is to be. “There is undoubtedly a strong possibility, notwithstanding the vagaries of contingency and misfortune, that my son might have fallen—or might, we could say, have voluntarily jumped, in accordance with the ethical codes with which he has been brought up—for a play you have made with some success, although, as I am persuaded you would concede, very little originality.” Plain speaking if you’re Henry James, perhaps.

What worried him most was that he had seen a murder like this once before, less than two months ago.

A lifetime’s accumulation, she thought, of a woman who had cared about things—things loved for their color and texture and their associations rather than their material value.

All

James Montgomery Flagg emerged almost overnight as America’s preeminent poster artist. As

realized he wasn’t the one

Gemma searched for a moment, then gave a laugh

jutting bosom, and closer acquaintance had done nothing

A rose on a steel stem,

and friend, for her good advice and infinite

His father, who had rebelled early against his Scots Presbyterian upbringing and declared himself an “intellectual agnostic”—or had it been “agnostic intellectual”?—had protested, but his mother insisted that the human animal had a need for structure, for ritual and discipline, for the ties with the community that the church provided, and for a sense of something larger than itself.

think that Claire did her grieving for Alastair Gilbert a long time ago, when she discovered that

had doubted the wisdom of investing oneself in one’s children, and had watched their

suspected more than a hint of narcissism in those who chose physical mirror images of themselves as mates.

Finding she trusted Jean Armitage’s account considerably more than Pamela Peacock’s, Gemma translated this as, Everyone was smashed on punch and limoncello. Roland was flirting outrageously with Reagan Keating, who didn’t slap him, and Jean Armitage is a meddlesome bitch.

As for Mrs. Armitage herself, she was not at all what Gemma had expected. She might be either side of seventy, Gemma thought, but well-preserved in a way that had nothing to do with makeup or cosmetic surgery. Her graying hair was thick and simply cut. She wore tan twill trousers, belted at a neat waist, and a lightweight white cotton blouse. Her skin was only faintly lined and her eyes were a bright, sharp blue. All in all, an attractive woman, Mrs. Armitage, and Gemma had a better idea of why Clive Glenn, the gardener, had spoken of her with both respect and admiration.

We’ve had two stabbing deaths in the past three days. Both worked in the same hospital. The second victim had Sandra Beaumont’s obituary in his pocket. According to his cousin, he and Beaumont had worked together.” He explained their theories about the envelope and how it might have come into Chowdhury’s possession. “You think someone sent him Beaumont’s obit as a threat?” Gill asked, her skepticism evident. “Her death wasn’t exactly news. She was killed in early October.

Melody shifted from one foot to the other, then added reluctantly, “He didn’t have a car. So if he’d disposed of her body, it would have had to have been in the immediate area, and no body was found.

A decade ago, they were involved in the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl in Somerset.” “What do you mean, involved?” “Neither of them was charged, but they were questioned, repeatedly. It was Tully’s best mate who went missing, a girl called Rosalind Summers. Jonathan Gibbs had been seen talking to her earlier that day. A witness said he was chatting her up.” Gemma frowned. “But he’d already know her well, if she was his sister’s best friend.

Have a cider. It’s a gift from my friend with an orchard up Stow way. Presses and bottles it himself every year.” When Kincaid accepted, Cain clicked his bottle against Kincaid’s. “Cheers.” Taking a long swig, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and leaned against the work top. Kincaid drank. The tart, fresh, green-apple taste seemed to explode in his mouth and made his eyes water. “Bugger, that’s stout stuff,” he said when he’d managed to swallow and blink back the tears. Cain grinned. “No alcohol percentage regulations on homemade cider. More than two of these will make you sorry the next day.” The smile faded. “What did you want to talk to me about, then?

still

… to the great Spirit and Fountain of life, all things, in both space and time, must be present … action, once begun, never ceases … thus the past is always present, although, for the purpose of fitting us for this mortal life, our ordinary senses are so constituted as to be unperceptive of these phenomena. —CATHERINE CROWE, FROM THE NIGHT-SIDE OF NATURE

But if you read Christie or Allingham or Sayers, the detective always got his man. And you’ll notice that the detective always operated outside the system—the stories expressed a comforting belief in the validity of individual action.

It’s fashionable these days to pooh-pooh the Golden Age crime novel as trivial and unrealistic, but that was not the case at all. It was their stand against chaos. The conflicts were intimate, rather than global, and justice, order and retribution always prevailed. They desperately needed that reassurance. Did you know that Britain lost nearly a third of its young men between 1914 and 1918? Yet that war didn’t physically threaten us in the same way as the next—it stayed safely on the European Front.

Kincaid refrained from saying that few children seemed to appreciate being given advantages their parents lacked—they saw such benefits as their due.

Losing

But in the summer of that year, a tragic epidemic spread throughout Philadelphia. Yellow fever struck, and thousands of people died from the disease. Betsy’s parents died early in the epidemic. Betsy’s sister Deborah died, too. Her sister Mary died soon after, also possibly from the fever.

It’s the little lies, the accumulation of self-deception.

all armor, hiding behind armor, like some soft-bodied sea creature. Afraid of…

journalism that did not always favor the police. Melody

and

Booth shook his head. “I’ll check the bathroom.

before

He was carried along as easily as a shell in a wave.

her. He’d only intended to gather a

The road snaked as it rose, and within a few miles the landscape had changed entirely. To Gemma, the moors seemed wild and desolate, alien as the moon—and yet she found them unexpectedly, searingly beautiful. The scene touched something in her that was both new and ancient, awakening a longing she hadn’t known she possessed. For the first time, she wondered how Hazel could have borne leaving.

Even with the quirky presentation, the food, Gemma had to admit, had been divine. From the creamy, smoky trout spread, to the delicate salad with roasted pears, caramel, and a local blue cheese, to the meltingly tender lamb and white beans served in camping tins, it had been of absolute star quality. What, Gemma had to wonder, was a chef so talented doing in this tiny village? She nibbled at the last bit of her pudding. The little jam jar she'd chosen had held a mixed berry crumble with a tangy layer of creme fraîche- a dessert she suspected she'd find herself dreaming about. All round her, spoons were being laid down and empty jars examined in hopes of finding a smidgen more.

The small glass jars filled with a spread made from local smoked trout were packed into a cool box. Earlier in the week, Grace had helped her make the labels for the jars, as well as for the two puddings which she would serve the same way. The guests would be encouraged to take home any that were left, as well as the larger jars of pickled vegetables. She'd fermented cabbage with radishes, and cauliflower with haricots vests and carrots. The spice mixtures were not as hot as traditional kimchee- a concession to the bland English palate- but still had a good bit of pop. The spicy, crunchy veg made a perfect counterpoint to the soft creaminess of the smoked lamb and beans. Those she was serving together, in individual camping tins, to be warmed just before lunch in the Beck House warming ovens. It was all a bit precious, the jars and the tins, but she wanted the meal to be something people would remember. She'd made a seeded crispbread for the potted trout course, and flatbreads to serve warm with the lamb and pickles. In between the trout and the lamb she planned a salad course- fresh greens, topped with roasted pear halves she'd done the previous day, a local soft blue cheese, and a drizzle of caramel.

Cream of mushroom. Come and taste." When Gemma came to stand beside her, Viv dipped some soup into a tasting spoon and handed it to her. "We've a local farmer growing mushrooms for the markets, so I buy whatever he has on hand. This has brown mushrooms, shiitake, and some dried porcini, for depth of flavor." Gemma took a little sip from the spoon. "Oh, I see what you mean," she said in surprise. "It's delicious, but it's somehow more- mushroomy." "It's not balanced yet. It needs more salt." Viv added a generous palmful from a dish by the hob and stirred the pot thoroughly. Grabbing two more spoons, she tasted it herself, then handed a spoonful to Gemma. "Now try." Obediently, Gemma tasted. This time the flavors seemed to pop on her tongue. "Oh, my goodness. It's not salty- it just tastes... I don't know... brighter?" "That's what salt does. It's a flavor enhancer. You have a good palate.

Friends come and go, Lewis, but the things you learn will always be yours, to use as you will.

I’ve always thought that exceptional beauty was as great an affliction as any physical handicap—perhaps more so. It is so difficult for the beautiful person, male or female, to develop a good character, isn’t it? The odds are stacked against them from the start.

They made Caesar salad with Cashel Blue cheese. They made Irish lobster confit in Kerrygold butter. They made black pudding the way Fergus remembered it from his childhood, and lamb sausages so delicate they almost melted in your mouth. Everything they put on the menu got raves.

empty

Attractive, too, in a sleek, bony way, if one cares for women who look intelligent.

After I read James and the Giant Peach, I dreamed of rolling away in the womb of a fruit from Bubby’s garden. It seems to me that in the literature revolving around children, children who are strange and misunderstood like me, at some point something comes along to transform their lives, to transport them to the magic netherworld to which they truly belong. And then they realize that their old life was just a mistake, that they were extraordinary all along and meant for bigger and better things. Secretly, I too am waiting to fall down a hole into Wonderland, or pass through the back of a wardrobe into Narnia. What other possibilities could I consider? Surely I will never be at home in this world.

London? Funny way to spend a holiday, if you ask

to part with it, that is,” Otto added with a twinkle born of long association with dealers.