Top 160 Richard Osman Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “Don’t get a small dog though, Joyce,’ says Ron. ‘Small dogs are like small men: always got a point to prove. Yapping it up, barking at cars.”

— Richard Osman

52. “Because things are more fun for you when they’re not planned, and they were more fun for him when they were planned. It’s best to have one of each in every relationship.”

— Richard Osman

53. “I’m sure,” says Elizabeth. “If murder were easy, none of us would survive Christmas.”

— Richard Osman

54. “If you are disappointed with your face, eventually it shows.”

— Richard Osman

55. “It was best to grab everything while you could. Who knows when your final swim might come, your final walk, your final kiss?”

— Richard Osman

56. “The prophet is often unheralded in his own land.”

— Richard Osman

57. “Life is about understanding opportunities. Understanding how rarely they come along, and then rising to meet them when they do.”

— Richard Osman

58. “That’s like lip salve,” says Pauline. “Once you start using it, your lips dry out, and so you have to keep using it.”

— Richard Osman

59. “Donna smiles again. Her eyes have remained shut. This is peaceful, this is helping. Just saying things out loud. Was this therapy? It didn’t feel like it. It just felt like finally telling somebody the truth.”

— Richard Osman

60. “I don’t know why we’re on this earth,” says Stephen. “Truly I don’t. But if I wanted to find the answer, I would begin with how much I love you.”

— Richard Osman

61. “I’d outlive a dog through pure spite,’ says Ron. ‘We’d just sit in opposite corners of the room, staring each other out, and see who went first. Not me. It’s like when we were negotiating with British Leyland in ’seventy-eight. The moment one of their lot went to the loo first, I knew we had ’em.’ Ron knocks back more wine. ‘Never go to the loo first. Tie a knot in it if you have to.”

— Richard Osman

62. “I remember dabbing at my mouth before I answered, like you see on television sometimes. It makes you look clever, try it.”

— Richard Osman

63. “Sitting in their gardens, doing a sudoku, knowing they had got away with murder.”

— Richard Osman

64. “DCI Chris Hudson is addressing the team. He always seems nice enough. He once opened some double doors for her without looking like he wanted a medal for it.”

— Richard Osman

65. “I’m afraid I don’t know WTF. I only discovered LOL from Joyce last week. I’m going to assume that it doesn’t refer to the Warsaw Transit Facility, as that was shut down in 1981 when the Russians came sniffing.”

— Richard Osman

66. “Patrice has fallen in love before, and this is beginning to show all the signs. That might just be the wine and the Jane Austen, though.”

— Richard Osman

67. “I volunteer because it makes me look helpful, and it gives me first dibs on the refreshments.”

— Richard Osman

68. “So every day Elizabeth opens her diary to a date two weeks ahead and writes herself a question. And every day she answers a question she set herself two weeks ago. This is her early-warning system. This is her team of scientists poring over seismology graphs. If there is going to be an earthquake, Elizabeth will be the first to know about it.”

— Richard Osman

69. “That twinkle in his eye was undimmed. The twinkle that gave an entirely undeserved suggestion of wisdom and charm. The twinkle that could make you walk down the aisle with a man almost ten years your junior and regret it within months. The twinkle you soon realize is actually the beam of a lighthouse, warning you off the rocks.”

— Richard Osman

70. “I would never have therapy, because who wants to unravel all that knitting? Not wroth the risk, thank you. My daughter, Joanna, has a therapist, although you’d be hard-pressed to know why if you saw the size of her house.”

— Richard Osman

71. “It was a community, and in Ibrahim’s opinion that was how human beings were designed to live. At Coopers Chase, anytime you wanted to be alone, you would simply close your front door, and anytime you wanted to be with people, you would open it up again. If there was a better recipe for happiness than that, then Ibrahim was yet to hear it.”

— Richard Osman

72. “Not rollercoasters, not skyscrapers, just the accumulation of small moments that turn acquaintance into friendship.”

— Richard Osman

73. “Donna, like any modern woman, I am any number of things, as and when the need arises. We have to be chameleons, don’t we?”

— Richard Osman

74. “And, by the by, Joanna solved the mystery of my private messages. She went into my account and searched all of them for me. She told me that if I didn’t want to be sent an endless tide of photographs of men’s genitals, I should really change my username. Needless to say, I haven’t changed it.”

— Richard Osman

75. “Legal, illegal. It’s a fine line. It’s nineteen eighty-four, and we’re protesting outside Manton Colliery in Nottinghamshire. Fighting to protect the jobs of fifteen hundred men, fighting to save an industry.’ ‘You had coal mines in England?’ says Bogdan. ‘The government, Thatcher, passes emergency legislation, saying you can’t picket outside someone else’s pit. But we do it anyway, we stand our ground.”

— Richard Osman

76. “It is fine to say ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ It is admirable. But it no longer applies when you’re eighty. When you are eighty, whatever doesn’t kill you just ushers you through the next door, and the next door and the next, and all of these doors lock behind you.”

— Richard Osman

77. “Was he a content man, doing the things he liked alone? Or was he a lonely man making the best out of what he had? Alone, or lonely? This question cropped up so often these days, Chris could no longer be confident of his answer. Though if he was a betting man, his money would be on lonely.”

— Richard Osman

78. “Ryan Baird behind bars would do no one any great harm.”

— Richard Osman

79. “I keep Gerry in a tight little ball just for me. I think if I let him loose here, it would overwhelm me, and I worry he might just blow away.”

— Richard Osman

80. “Joyce doesn’t take her seriously, Ibrahim doesn’t take her seriously, Ron doesn’t take her seriously. They respect her, she thinks, they know they can rely on her, they take care of her – shudder – but they refuse to take her seriously. Who knew that was the secret all along?”

— Richard Osman

81. “Pearson Street is just what you want a shopping street to be – busy, friendly, local, and happy. Joyce thinks it’s so perfect that it’s surely only six months away from having a Starbucks and losing what it now has.”

— Richard Osman

82. “Of all the things to lose, to lose one’s mind? Let them take a leg or a lung; let them take anything before they take that. Before you become “poor Rosemary” or “poor Frank,” catching the last glimpses of the sun and seeing them for what they were. Before there were no more trips, no more games, no more Murder Clubs. Before there was no more you.”

— Richard Osman

83. “We might see a million white swans, and yet we are not able to say that all swans are white. Yet we see just one black swan, and we can say with absolute certainty that not all swans are white.”

— Richard Osman

84. “I’m afraid I don’t know WTF. I only discovered LOL from Joyce last week.”

— Richard Osman

85. “They say a man who desires revenge should dig two graves, and this is surely right.”

— Richard Osman

86. “I like it when men cry. Not too much, but this was just right.”

— Richard Osman

87. “They had got away with it, as some people do, I’m afraid. The older you get, the more you have to come to terms with that.”

— Richard Osman

88. “Wherever there is turmoil, people try to protect their assets. Or sell them.”

— Richard Osman

89. “Thank you so much for reading The Thursday Mystery Club. Unless you haven’t read it yet and have just turned straight to the acknowledgments, which I accept is a possibility. You must live your life as you choose.”

— Richard Osman

90. “Good to see you, Elizabeth. Are those flowers for me?” “No, I have taken to carrying flowers around with me as an affectation,” says Elizabeth, handing them over as she is ushered in.”

— Richard Osman

91. “You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen.”

— Richard Osman

92. “The real secret was that when they looked at each other, they each thought they had the better deal. But, however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears. When the man you love with every fiber starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.”

— Richard Osman

93. “He always found it easy to wake up in the morning; he just found it hard to sleep at night.”

— Richard Osman

94. “One of the first things you learn at Coopers Chase is that some people can still actually hear.”

— Richard Osman

95. “But, however much life teaches you that nothing lasts, it is still a shock when it disappears. When the man you love with every fibre starts returning to the stars, an atom at a time.”

— Richard Osman

96. “They don’t need anything in return other than her happiness and her friendship. They just like her. It has taken Elizabeth a long time to accept the truth of that.”

— Richard Osman

97. “Don’t get me wrong – I know what an engineer is, and I know what chemicals are, but I can’t join the dots.”

— Richard Osman

98. “You’re not hungover?’ You drank just as much as me.’ ‘The moment I got in I drank two raw eggs with Tabasco sauce,’ says Elizabeth. Joyce nods. ‘I ate some wedding cake, then had a Baileys.”

— Richard Osman

99. “Anytime you would see a photograph of him in the paper, the caption would always be something like, “Talks collapsed late last night.”

— Richard Osman

100. “Bear in mind, also, that this was past ten and I had already said, “Well, this has been lovely,” more than once.”

— Richard Osman