Top 40 Ruth Rendell Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write.”

— Ruth Rendell

2. “To say that Agatha Christie’s characters are cardboard cut-outs is an insult to cardboard cut-outs.”

— Ruth Rendell

3. “Many emotions go under the name of love, and almost any one of them will for a while divert the mind from the real, true, and perfect thing.”

— Ruth Rendell

4. “I get a lot of letters from people. They say “I want to be a writer. What should I do?” I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.”

— Ruth Rendell

5. “I can’t exist without books.”

— Ruth Rendell

6. “The knives of jealousy are honed on details.”

— Ruth Rendell

7. “Ten thousand years of civilization shed in an instant when you put a woman behind the wheel of a car.”

— Ruth Rendell

8. “I really do literally put myself into a character’s shoes.”

— Ruth Rendell

9. “We no more forget the faces of our enemies than of those we love.”

— Ruth Rendell

10. “When one has children one has no privacy. They take it for granted that what is yours is theirs, personal things and the secrets of your heart, as well as possessions.”

— Ruth Rendell

11. “I think about death every day – what it would be like, why it would happen to me. It would be humiliating to be afraid.”

— Ruth Rendell

12. “While most of the things you’ve worried about have never happened, it’s a different story with the things you haven’t worried about. They are the ones that happen.”

— Ruth Rendell

13. “Burden thought irrelevantly that Wendy Williams must be attracted by bald men, first Rodney with his exaggerated forehead, naked as an apple, then this pebble-head.”

— Ruth Rendell

14. “We always know when we are awake that we cannot be dreaming even though when actually dreaming we feel all this may be real.”

— Ruth Rendell

15. “I try, and I think I succeed, in making my readers feel sorry for my psychopaths, because I do.”

— Ruth Rendell

16. “It’s living – a broad spectrum of living – that teaches you how to live, not philosophy. Philosophy teaches you how to think.”

— Ruth Rendell

17. “I kill, therefore I am.”

— Ruth Rendell

18. “It is not so much true that the world loves a lover as that the lover loves all the world.”

— Ruth Rendell

19. “The admonitions of those who seldom remonstrate are more effective than the commands of naggers.”

— Ruth Rendell

20. “You couldn’t love someone the way he had loved her and then be turned off them in five minutes by nothing more than lies and daydreams. Could you? Could you?”

— Ruth Rendell

21. “The trouble with psychology is that it doesn’t take human nature into account.”

— Ruth Rendell

22. “It was useless arguing with people like her. They had stereotyped minds that ran along grooves of stock response and the commonplace.”

— Ruth Rendell

23. “Don’t hate anyone,” she had said. “It’s quite useless and harms the hater while it does nothing at all to the hated.”

— Ruth Rendell

24. “Nobody really lives in the present.”

— Ruth Rendell

25. “Some say life is the thing, but I prefer reading.”

— Ruth Rendell

Featured in: Reading Quotes

26. “She was happiest when sitting about and reading. She had read thousands of books, seeing no point in doing anything else unless you had to.”

— Ruth Rendell

27. “People were, as he had long suspected, uniformly vile and rotten, vastly inferior to things. Objects never let you down.”

— Ruth Rendell

28. “Greed and envy took from a man’s heart everything but – well, greed and envy.”

— Ruth Rendell

29. “People are different in reality from the way you’ve seen them while making scenarios in your mind. For one thing, they’re less consistent. They surprise you all the time.”

— Ruth Rendell

30. “Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd.”

— Ruth Rendell

31. “The trouble with psychology,” said Wexford epigrammatically, ’is that it doesn’t take human nature into account.”

— Ruth Rendell

32. “I’ve had two proposals since I’ve been a widow. I am a wonderful catch, you know. I have a lot of money.”

— Ruth Rendell

33. “Maybe being married is talking to oneself with one’s other self listening.”

— Ruth Rendell

34. “She wasn’t there. He wouldn’t have had to look too closely. She stood out from others like an angel in hell or a rose in a sewer.”

— Ruth Rendell

35. “I never knew anyone actually buy cakes when they were hot...”

— Ruth Rendell

36. “I think to be driven to want to kill must be such a terrible burden.”

— Ruth Rendell

37. “Literacy is in our veins like blood. It enters every other phrase. It is next to impossible to hold a real conversation, as against an interchange of instructions and acquiescences, in which reference to the printed word is not made or in which the implications of something read do not occur.”

— Ruth Rendell

38. “He turned on to the track and wondered why no birds were singing. The only sound he could hear was the buzz and rattle of a drill, which he assumed to be the farmer doing something to a fence. It was, in fact, a woodpecker whose presence would have thrilled him had he known what it was.”

— Ruth Rendell

39. “His school had been so committed to establishing equality that the staff told a pupil he or she had done well only if they could tell every other member of the class the same thing.”

— Ruth Rendell

40. “She didn’t really know London, only lived in it.”

— Ruth Rendell

41. “Growing old is not all sweetness and light. Old women especially are invisible.”

— Ruth Rendell

42. “There are only two periods in a woman’s life when she hopes to be taken for older than she is, under sixteen and over ninety.”

— Ruth Rendell

43. “They spoke from a distant past when everyone read books and most people had hobbies, made things, played cards and chess, dressed up and played charades, sewed and painted and wrote letters and sent postcards.”

— Ruth Rendell

44. “They remained the same and could be an endless source of pleasure and satisfaction. There might be people, or a person, of whom that was also true, but he had never, by the age of eighteen, come across any of them.”

— Ruth Rendell

45. “He would have to get used to it, she thought. He would have to get used to her being more and more preoccupied with books.”

— Ruth Rendell

46. “To be a classic, a novel should be original.”

— Ruth Rendell

47. “The sensations he had were shared by many of the young, poor and beautiful: how unfair it was that they should be denied benefits which the old and ugly enjoyed.”

— Ruth Rendell