Top 40 Peter Swanson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Strangers are just friends we haven’t met yet.”

— Peter Swanson

2. “Truthfully, I don’t think murder is necessarily as bad as people make it out to be. Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended? And your wife, for example, seems like the kind worth killing.”

— Peter Swanson

3. “One of the paradoxes of her anxious life was that in the midst of doing something slightly reckless, Kate often felt the most normal. It was as though her anxiety, always with her, was given a reason for existing.”

— Peter Swanson

4. “The thing is, and maybe I’m biased by all those years I’ve spent in fictional realms built on deceit, I don’t trust narrators any more than I trust the actual people in my life. We never get the whole truth, not from anybody. When we first meet someone, before words are ever spoken, there are already lies and half-truths. The clothes we wear cover the truth of our bodies. But they also present who we want to be to the world. They are fabrications, figuratively and literally.”

— Peter Swanson

5. “It was a beautiful spring night, the air rain-washed and smelling of crushed blossoms, and Henry felt as if the muscles of his body were singing in unison.”

— Peter Swanson

6. “It was The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, who not so long ago had been revealed to actually be J. K. Rowling.”

— Peter Swanson

7. “Books are time travel. True readers all know this. But books don’t just take you back to the time in which they were written; they can take you back to different versions of yourself.”

— Peter Swanson

8. “I’d like to say something here about how I’ll be with Claire again soon, but I don’t believe any of that nonsense. When we die, we become nothing. The same nothing we were before we were born, but of course this time that nothingness is forever.”

— Peter Swanson

9. “I was born with a different kind of morality. The morality of an animal – of a crow or a fox or an owl – and not of a normal human being. I.”

— Peter Swanson

10. “I think that romantic love, not family love, is the most destructive force on earth. It’s the only thing that makes otherwise good people hurt one another.” “It doesn’t have to.” “It does, actually. I’m not talking about what people will do for love. I’m talking about what people do to the ones they love. They break each other’s hearts.”

— Peter Swanson

11. “Her hand was like a bundle of chopsticks covered in a layer of tissue paper.”

— Peter Swanson

12. “My younger sister, Emily, who knows me better than anyone in the world, told me recently that my problem with relationships is that I fall in love with every woman I’m attracted to. “Don’t most guys?” I said. “No,” she said. “Most guys just want to sleep with all the women they’re attracted to. The last thing they want to do is fall in love. You call yourself a detective, and you don’t know that?” “Trust me. I also want to sleep with these women.”

— Peter Swanson

13. “I always say that two martinis are too many, and three is not enough.”

— Peter Swanson

14. “Everyone has a full life, even if it ends soon. All lives are complete experiences.”

— Peter Swanson

15. “Everyone has a full life, even if it ends soon. All lives are complete experiences. Do you know the T. S. Eliot quote?” “Which one?” “ ‘The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree are of equal duration.’ I know it’s not justification for murder, but I think it underscores how so many people think that all humans deserve a long life, when the truth is that any life at all is probably more than any of us deserves.”

— Peter Swanson

16. “He’d always wondered what was worse: to feel emptiness and not know what would make it go away, or to feel emptiness and know exactly what was missing. Tonight, for whatever reason, he seemed to have the answer. He understood with evangelical clarity how fleeting our lives are, and how foolish it is to mourn those who’ve left too soon.”

— Peter Swanson

17. “My father used to say: every hundred years, all new people. I don’t know exactly why he said it, or what it meant to him – a variation on being mindful of death, I suppose – but I knew what it meant to me.”

— Peter Swanson

18. “If I had reasons to love you, then there’d be reasons for me to not love you.”

— Peter Swanson

19. “We live in an age of mass murder, and two dead bodies, even young ones, just don’t cut it, anymore.”

— Peter Swanson

20. “I know, right. I keep thinking.”

— Peter Swanson

21. “If you are still alive when you read this, close your eyes. I am under their lids, growing black.”

— Peter Swanson

22. “I began to see even less of her, because she had started dating a fellow Texan in her program who had a flat in Camden Town. “I know it’s lame that I come all the way to London and end up dating some kid from Lubbock named Nolan, but he’s a cute kid.”

— Peter Swanson

23. “I’ve always felt that being with people, as opposed to being alone, can make you feel loneliness more acutely.”

— Peter Swanson

24. “Harry felt a sudden and revolting sense of pure grief. It swept through him like an attack of nausea, an absolute knowledge that he was all alone and life was meaningless and devoid of joy.”

— Peter Swanson

25. “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy – it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”

— Peter Swanson

26. “And, honestly, I’m not young, but what is that word they condescendingly use for old people when they can get around on their own two feet?” “Spry,” I said.”

— Peter Swanson

27. “One of the paradoxes of her anxious life was that in the midst of doing something reckless, Kate often felt the most normal.”

— Peter Swanson

28. “Everyone dies, but not everyone has to see someone they love with another person. She struck the first blow.”

— Peter Swanson

29. “They had a secret, the two of them, and there was no better way to start a friendship than with a secret.”

— Peter Swanson

30. “And to take another life was, in many ways, the greatest expression of what it meant to be alive.”

— Peter Swanson

31. “She gestured toward the bartender, a teenager with spiky hair and a shiny chin, and asked for a Hendrick’s martini with two olives. When her drink came she raised it in my direction. I had one sip left, and said, “Here’s to inoculation against international travel.”

— Peter Swanson

32. “I imagine she acted the way she thought you wanted to see her.”

— Peter Swanson

33. “Everyone dies. What difference does it make if a few bad apples get pushed along a little sooner than God intended?”

— Peter Swanson

34. “It’s like a tapestry in there,” Faith said, her breath warm against my cheek. “There are flecks of gray and yellow and blue and brown and pink.” Eric rarely spoke of Faith, but one night as we lay in his bed, he asked if it bothered me that Faith was around so much.”

— Peter Swanson

35. “But now I had a new reason. I had Lily. I was doing this because of Lily. I was going to kill my wife so that I could be with her. And this reason made more sense than any of the others.”

— Peter Swanson

36. “If you gave a man just the smallest amount of power – a handsome face, the ability to sing, a little money – the first thing he’d do is destroy a woman, or two if he could.”

— Peter Swanson

37. “No, but I’ve thought a lot about it. I only wouldn’t do it because I’d probably get caught and have to spend my life in prison.”

— Peter Swanson

38. “Or was she one of those rarities, a human who didn’t need other humans in her life?”

— Peter Swanson

39. “Matthew, who’d already texted Mira to tell her he was running a little late, leaned back behind his desk and did one of the things he was very good at doing. He listened to a woman.”

— Peter Swanson

40. “She laughed. “Would you really kill him if you could get away with it?” “Sure,” he said.”

— Peter Swanson

41. “She was watchful.”

— Peter Swanson

42. “Approaching forty, George felt as though his world had been slowly drained of all its colors. He’d passed that age when he could reasonably expect to fall madly in love with someone and raise a family, or to take the world by storm, or to have anything surprising lift him out of his day-to-day existence.”

— Peter Swanson

43. “I had survived the vulnerability of childhood, and the danger of first love. There was comfort in knowing that I would never be in either of those positions again, that, from now on, I would be the only person responsible for my own happiness.”

— Peter Swanson

44. “Just because my boot was tapping didn’t mean I liked the song.”

— Peter Swanson

45. “The awful thing about loneliness, Jack thought, not for the first time, is that it isn’t always cured by other people.”

— Peter Swanson

46. “No, the ache in my chest was that I felt alone. That there were no other humans in the world who knew what I knew. I.”

— Peter Swanson