You are my heart, my life, my one and only thought.
There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.
It has always seemed to me that so long as you produce your dramatic effect, accuracy of detail matters little. I have never striven for it and I have made some bad mistakes in consequence. What matter if I hold my readers?
I have my own views about Nature’s methods, though I feel that it is rather like a beetle giving his.
Well, I’m a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.
The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.
I am a brain, Watson. The rest of me is a mere appendix.
Nothing clears up a case so much as stating it to another person.
The ideal reasoner, he remarked, would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it.
My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.
Skill is fine, and genius is splendid, but the right contacts are more valuable than either.
There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus!
When the impossible has been eliminated, all that remains no matter how improbable is possible.
I feel that there is reason lurking in you somewhere, so we will patiently grope round for it.
It was all love on my side, and all good comradeship and friendship on hers. When we parted she was a free woman, but I could never again be a free man.
You yourself may not be luminous, but you are a conductor of light.
It is quite a three-pipe problem.
To all the world he was the man of violence, half animal and half demon; but to her he always remained the little wilful boy of her own girlhood, the child who had clung to her hand. Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him.
My uncle, Mr. Stephen Maple, had been at the same time the most successful and the least respectable of our family, so that we hardly knew whether to take credit for his wealth or to feel ashamed of his position.
No man lives or has ever lived who has brought the same amount of study and of natural talent to the detection of crime which I have done.