Top 35 Elly Griffiths Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There’s a pleasure being mad that only the madman knows.”

— Elly Griffiths

2. “You need a break, a complete rest, recharge your batteries.′ Recharge your batteries. What the hell does that mean? Nelson prides himself on not needing batteries. He’s an old-fashioned, wind-up model.”

— Elly Griffiths

3. “Grey’s OK on a man,’ says Mary-Anne. ‘Silver fox and all that.’ Ruth notices that Frank doesn’t seem to mind this description. She also muses that there isn’t a female equivalent to ‘silver fox’. ‘Grey-haired old bat’ doesn’t cover it somehow.”

— Elly Griffiths

4. “Nelson nods again. ‘It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. The worst, the very worst. When you have children, suddenly the world seems such a terrifying place. Every stick and stone, every car, every animal, Christ, every person, is suddenly a terrible threat. You realise you’d do anything, anything, to keep them safe: steal, lie, kill, you name it. But sometimes there just isn’t anything you can do. And that’s the hardest thing.”

— Elly Griffiths

5. “Look which way the bones lie. The position tells you everything. In Christian burials, bodies are usually buried facing east, supposedly towards heaven. Sometimes priests and religious leaders are buried facing west, so that they can rise facing their people. Facing downwards, you are looking at something else altogether.”

— Elly Griffiths

6. “We tend to think of the Romans as so civilised, he’d said, so outraged by the barbaric Iron Age practices but there is plenty of evidence of Roman punishment burials, ritual killing and even infanticide. A boy’s skull found in St Albans about ten years ago, for example, showed that its owner had been battered to death and then decapitated. At Springfield in Kent foundation sacrifices of paired babies had been found at all four corners of a Roman temple.”

— Elly Griffiths

7. “Does the world really need another long essay on environmental archaeology and freshwater mollusks? Well, it’s going to get one, whether it likes it or not.”

— Elly Griffiths

8. “She’s unmarried but, as she confided early on to Judy, ‘not short of offers’. Nelson often thinks that Jo is not nearly as attractive as she thinks she is but, as with all these things, her insane self-belief rubs off on others, and after a week King’s Lynn police were treating her as if she were Helen of Troy. Her technique is divide and rule.”

— Elly Griffiths

9. “You know how thick I am. I don’t even eat yoghurt because it’s got culture in it.”

— Elly Griffiths

10. “His parents, who were Catholic in the stubborn way some old recusant English families are, sticking to their faith all through the Reformation, never expected any of their children to take it this far.”

— Elly Griffiths

11. “She suppresses the ignoble thought that it’s hard to see what two complex, intelligent men can see in Michelle. She must have hidden depths, that’s all. Ruth sometimes suspects that she, herself, has hidden shallows.”

— Elly Griffiths

12. “She doesn’t place the rights of animals above those of humans but she does, undoubtedly, prefer her cats to many humans.”

— Elly Griffiths

13. “When she bought the cats her mother asked her straight out if they were ‘baby substitutes’. ‘No,’ Ruth had answered, straight-faced. ‘They’re kittens. If I had a baby it would be a cat substitute.”

— Elly Griffiths

14. “Class is a stronger social adhesive than nationality.”

— Elly Griffiths

15. “Ruth doesn’t have children and she has never been pregnant. Now that she is nearly forty and thinking that she might never have a child, it all seems such a waste. All that machinery chugging away inside her, making her bleed each month, making her moody and bloated and desperate for chocolate. All that internal plumbing, all those pipes gurgling away, all for nothing.”

— Elly Griffiths

16. “Why is her first reaction to invitations always to think of a way of refusing them?”

— Elly Griffiths

17. “It’s to make sense of things,’ she said, at last. ‘Nothing’s as bad if you put it in writing. It helps you to take control, order things. Find a pattern, like you said.”

— Elly Griffiths

18. “Ruth isn’t going to be bossed about by a woman in tight trousers who thinks she’s Helen Mirren playing Jane Tennison. She.”

— Elly Griffiths

19. “Peter is suffering from an attack of nostalgia, she knows the symptoms. She mustn’t join in otherwise she’ll be swept away too, drowning in a quicksand of the past.”

— Elly Griffiths

20. “Libraries are the cathedrals of the modern age. All that knowledge, available for anyone to use. It’s quite a subversive thought.”

— Elly Griffiths

21. “You can’t convert by words, only by deeds.”

— Elly Griffiths

22. “She has got her figure back after having the baby, which is a shame – she was rather hoping to get someone else’s.”

— Elly Griffiths

23. “Why are Georgette Heyer’s covers so naff? When you think of all the exciting things that happen – abductions, false identities, wild horseback chases – the front of the book nearly always shows a woman in a ballgown, simpering sweetly up at a man.”

— Elly Griffiths

24. “A people who elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.”

— Elly Griffiths

25. “Once you have had a child, can you ever go back to being the person you were?”

— Elly Griffiths

26. “The past is dead. She, as an archaeologist, knows that better than most. But she knows too that it can be seductive.”

— Elly Griffiths

27. “We’ll have to see if CSI picked up anything from the scene,’ says Nelson. ‘Are they finished?’ ‘Yes,’ says Tanya. ‘Shall I liaise with them?’ Tanya loves liaising, it sounds so much more important than keeping in touch. ‘If.”

— Elly Griffiths

28. “How can women like Shona and Michelle keep them draped all day? Ruth’s scarves either fall in her coffee or try to strangle her.”

— Elly Griffiths

29. “Cool. Can I come over? Phil’s got the flu and he’s being such a man about it.”

— Elly Griffiths

30. “There’s a pleasure sure in being mad,’ says Cathbad, ’that none but madmen know.”

— Elly Griffiths

31. “The wife belongs to a book club. All they do is moan about their husbands. They never talk about the bloody books at all.”

— Elly Griffiths

32. “To lose your child, to have her spirited away like something from a fairy tale, surely that must be every mother’s nightmare.”

— Elly Griffiths

33. “Ruth enjoys teaching summer school. The students are always keen, often they are older people who have always dreamt of being archaeologists, merchant bankers inspired by Time Team, old ladies with a surprisingly detailed knowledge of Bronze Age burial customs. There are usually lots of foreigners too, because the university needs the money: Americans with complicated dietary needs, earnest Chinese students, casually elegant Italians.”

— Elly Griffiths

34. “Flint jumps onto the table and arranges himself, with geometrical precision, on the exact article that Ruth is reading.”

— Elly Griffiths

35. “If one should say to you that the soul perishes like the body, answer that the flower withers but the seed remains.”

— Elly Griffiths

36. “But the partner usually does know, thinks Tim. Even if they don’t know what they know.”

— Elly Griffiths