Top 60 Kerry Greenwood Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Phryne was feeling most displeased with a species to which, she reminded herself, she belonged.”

— Kerry Greenwood

2. “Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants: it is the creed of slaves. William Pitt Speech to the House of Commons, 1783.”

— Kerry Greenwood

3. “Bert was short and stout. Cec was tall and lanky. Between them, there was nothing that they could not reach.”

— Kerry Greenwood

4. “One only has a few fragrant nights of spring. Store your memories for when you are old. You will enjoy them again under such a moon as this.”

— Kerry Greenwood

5. “Dot wondered how she was to mention Phryne’s habit of strewing her boudoir with beautiful naked young men. She could not think of a method of introducing the subject and decided to leave it to Phryne to cope with.”

— Kerry Greenwood

6. “So it was that Phryne acquired a skimpy costume of Fugi cotton, with fringes, in a blinding shade of pink known colloquially as ‘baby’s bottom’, a pair of near-kid boots with two-inch heels, an evening bag fringed and beaded to within an inch of complete inutility, stockings in peach, and a dreadful cloche hat with a drunken brim in electric blue plush. Her method in choosing these garments was simple. Anything at which Dot exclaimed, ‘Oh, no, Miss!’ she bought.”

— Kerry Greenwood

7. “Amazement could go no further. If Phryne had ridden in on a unicorn he would merely have remarked on its elegant hocks and golden horn and suggested that she enter it weight for age at Felmington. Well, no, not a unicorn. Not Phryne. A dragon, perhaps. He was sure that she could tame a dragon.”

— Kerry Greenwood

8. “I’m concealing a lot of things. That’s what a lady does.”

— Kerry Greenwood

9. “They are not aesthetic like a puppy or a kitten. In fact, they always look drunk to me. Look at that one – you’d swear he had been hitting the gin.”

— Kerry Greenwood

10. “If you are not scared then there is no merit in being brave.”

— Kerry Greenwood

11. “It’s always good business practice to eliminate any potential avengers.”

— Kerry Greenwood

12. “Money can’t buy happiness but it can vastly improve the quality of your misery.”

— Kerry Greenwood

13. “It was always easier to genuinely praise than to try and find something nice to say about rubbish.”

— Kerry Greenwood

14. “Now we will all die. What a pity. I haven’t done half the wicked things I wanted to do, and the ones I have done I haven’t done anything like enough.”

— Kerry Greenwood

15. “The world is too harsh a place to contemplate directly, without a cushion of fancy and belief.”

— Kerry Greenwood

16. “She dropped on his chest with both knees and vengefully banged his head on the floor, once to knock him out and twice because it made her feel better.”

— Kerry Greenwood

17. “Both had suggestive bulges in their pockets which told of either huge genitalia or trousered pistols.”

— Kerry Greenwood

18. “Phryne looked at a large statue of St. Joseph, for whom she had always had an admiration. It can’t have been easy, managing a girl with an inexplicable pregnancy. But he had accepted the word of the Lord and not put her away. Later generations had not been so forgiving.”

— Kerry Greenwood

19. “She wondered, briefly, if she was beautiful, decided she was and blew a kiss to her reflection.”

— Kerry Greenwood

20. “My head throbbed and my mouth tasted like incontinent parrots had roosted there overnight. I.”

— Kerry Greenwood

21. “Tinker wrote neatly, though his spelling was not good, Ruth’s recipes would never fail for confusion between ‘add sugar’ and ‘seethe’, but Jane’s writing looked like an intoxicated inky spider had staggered across the page on the way to the bar for another drink. Which it really didn’t need.”

— Kerry Greenwood

22. “She looked as plump and self-confident as the city pigeons outside, and as sure of her place.”

— Kerry Greenwood

23. “This is what ‘forever’ means, my dear. You don’t walk into danger on your own. Not anymore.”

— Kerry Greenwood

24. “And is it any wonder that the poor woman broke out into fairies when she had been deprived of any fiction in her youth?”

— Kerry Greenwood

25. “She was always over the horizon, chasing stars.”

— Kerry Greenwood

26. “We learn love from the people who love us.”

— Kerry Greenwood

27. “I don’t like the idea of being killed by fools. I shall have to ensure that this does not happen.”

— Kerry Greenwood

28. “Phryne had defences against almost any argument, but not against two pretty young men at her feet. Very decorative they were and she might have uses for them.”

— Kerry Greenwood

29. “I always like cases when the victim’s been practically begging to be killed. It means I don’t have to be sorry for him.”

— Kerry Greenwood

30. “And they need not cause you grief. As my Highland grandmother said – and she had the Sight – “Tis not the dead ye have to be concerned about! Beware of the Living!” And she was a wise woman. The dead are beyond your help or mine, poor things. But the living need us. Thirty souls at the least, Phryne, are still on that island to praise God who might now be angels – or devils.”

— Kerry Greenwood

31. “She had always found platypuses irresistible proof that God likes a joke as much as anyone else.”

— Kerry Greenwood

32. “She was sensible of the fact that while there were two sets of masculine arms to fall into, and one of them her current pet, Phryne had fallen into Dot’s.”

— Kerry Greenwood

33. “Lust was a reliable emotion, but greed was altogether simpler to satisfy and you got to keep your clothes on.”

— Kerry Greenwood

34. “Dot had discovered in herself a keen interest in diligent research of nice calm paper records, which never wept or ran away or turned nasty.”

— Kerry Greenwood

35. “The butterfly danced on the flower.”

— Kerry Greenwood

36. “I have a theory that kitchens, once they reach a certain level of complexity, attract new gadgets into their orbit, like planets. Only this can account for the fact that I own two melon ballers.”

— Kerry Greenwood

37. “His voice was heavy with Slavic fatalism.”

— Kerry Greenwood

38. “They had known that it would happen. Yet they had not prevented it. Their world had been overused, abused, their forests logged, their precious fossil fuels wasted, their rich obscenely wealthy, their poor reduced to beggary. They had been powerful enough to put up the satellites, they had plated the landscape with their roads, crisscrossed it with their machines. And now where were they?”

— Kerry Greenwood

39. “If you repose your trust in anything, Mr. Collins, you can rely on her. She may whisk you in the night as on a broom and frighten the wits out of you, but what she swears to do, she will do. And she is very fond of her maid.”

— Kerry Greenwood

40. “First, a bath. I’m feeling soiled. Too much contact with cold reality, I think.”

— Kerry Greenwood

41. “The Colonel was far too firmly married and full of military honours to be a threat to Phryne’s virtue, or what remained of it, so she agreed.”

— Kerry Greenwood

42. “Narrative has its prerogatives and I am not going to spoil a good story or the fairies may not give me any new ones.”

— Kerry Greenwood

43. “Never trust a man who bites the heads off chickens is probably a good sound rule of practice.”

— Kerry Greenwood

44. “If I ever saw my muse she would be an old woman with a tight bun and spectacles poking me in the middle of the back and growling, “Wake up and write the book!”

— Kerry Greenwood

45. “I can’t afford to spend days in self loathing as everyone expects fat women to do. Self loathing eats your life.”

— Kerry Greenwood

46. “A young man in one’s hotel bedroom is capable of being explained, but a corpse is always a hindrance.”

— Kerry Greenwood

47. “Ruth did not approve of young men. So noisy.”

— Kerry Greenwood

48. “You’ve been making a regular habit of flinging yourself in front of bullets,” she remarked amiably. “It’s really not a good custom. Curb this tendency to self-immolation.”

— Kerry Greenwood

49. “All this display, while the working classes were pinched beyond bearing; it was not wise, or tasteful: it smacked of ostentatious wealth. The Europe from which Phryne had lately come was impoverished, even the nobility; and was keeping its head down, still shocked by the Russian revolution. It had become fashionable to make no display; understatement had become most stylish.”

— Kerry Greenwood

50. “To Hell with all racialists,′ she said aloud. ‘And to Hell with eugenics, degenerate heredity, miscegenation and frauds who pile up skulls like a conqueror as well. May they choke on their bones.’ A passing gentleman boggled at her and crossed to the other side of La Trobe Street. ‘There is no place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven,’ she added, rolling the phrase over her tongue and filing it for future reference.”

— Kerry Greenwood