| Quote | Author | Source | Email Quote |
|---|
| "Can a husband ever carry about a secret all his life and a woman who loves him have no suspicion of it? I knew it by his refusal to talk about some episodes in his American life. I knew it by certain precautions he took. I knew it by certain words he let fall. I knew it by the way he looked at unexpected strangers." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Valley of Fear |  |
| It had darkened since I left, and now I could only see here and there the glistening of moisture upon the black walls, and far away down at the end of the shaft the gleam of the broken water. I shouted; but only the same half-human cry of the fall was borne back to my ears. | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Final Problem | |
| "It is quite a three pipe problem . . . " | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "I hardly looked at his face. His knees were what I wished to see." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "As a rule," said Holmes, "the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "You may place considerable confidence in Mr. Holmes, sir," said the police agent loftily. "He has his own little methods, which are, if he won't mind my saying so, just a little too theoretical and fantastic, but he has the makings of a detective in him. It is not too much to say that once or twice, as in that business of the Sholto murder and the Agra treasure, he has been more nearly correct than the official force." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "And now, Doctor, we've done our work, so it's time we had some play. A sandwich and a cup of coffee, and then off to violin-land, where all is sweetness and delicacy and harmony, and there are no red-headed clients to vex us with their conundrums." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "I know, my dear Watson, that you share my love of all that is bizarre and outside the conventions and humdrum routine of everyday life. You have shown your relish for it by the enthusiasm which has prompted you to chronicle, and, if you will excuse my saying so, somewhat to embellish so many of my own little adventures." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| "As a rule, when I have heard some slight indication of the course of events, I am able to guide myself by the thousands of other similar cases which occur to my memory. In the present instance I am forced to admit that the facts are, to the best of my belief, unique." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Red-Headed League | |
| Mystery and disappointment are not absolutely indispensable to the growth of love, but they are, very often, its powerful auxiliaries. | Charles Dickens | Nicholas Nickleby | |
| "This affair must all be unravelled from within." He tapped his forehead. "These little grey cells. It is 'up to them'--as you say over here." | Agatha Christie | The Mysterious Affair at Styles | |
| "Every murderer is probably somebody's old friend," observed Poirot philosophically. "You cannot mix up sentiment and reason." | Agatha Christie | The Mysterious Affair at Styles | |
| I know that journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones Dead" to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive. | G. K. Chesterton | The Wisdom of Father Brown | |
| Any attempt at recovering the bodies was absolutely hopeless, and there, deep down in that dreadful caldron of swirling water and seething foam, will lie for all time the most dangerous criminal and the foremost champion of the law of their generation. | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Final Problem | |
| "I think that I may go so far as to say, Watson, that I have not lived wholly in vain," he remarked. "If my record were closed to-night I could still survey it with equanimity. The air of London is the sweeter for my presence." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Final Problem | |
| "When you have one of the first brains of Europe up against you, and all the powers of darkness at his back, there are infinite possibilities." | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Valley of Fear | |
| "Dear me, Watson, is it possible that you have not penetrated the fact that the case hangs upon the missing dumb-bell?" | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Valley of Fear | |
| "One dumb-bell, Watson! Consider an athlete with one dumb-bell. Picture to yourself the unilateral development - the imminent danger of a spinal curvature. Shocking, Watson, shocking!" | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | The Valley of Fear | |
