Quotes

It was a September evening, and not yet seven o'clock, but the day had been a dreary one, and a dense drizzly fog lay low upon the great city. Mud-colored clouds drooped sadly over the muddy streets. Down the Strand the lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement. The yellow glare from the shop-windows streamed out into the steamy, vaporous air, and threw a murky, shifting radiance across the crowded thoroughfare. There was, to my mind, something eerie and ghost-like in the endless procession of faces which flitted across these narrow bars of light,--sad faces and glad, haggard and merry. Like all human kind, they flitted from the gloom into the light, and so back into the gloom once more. ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle He held up the lantern, and his hand shook until the circles of light flickered and wavered all round us. Miss Morstan seized my wrist, and we all stood with thumping hearts, straining our ears. From the great black house there sounded through the silent night the saddest and most pitiful of sounds--the shrill, broken whimpering of a frightened woman. ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle He raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened. "It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?" ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "My mind," he said, "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. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world." ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "The only unofficial consulting detective," he answered. "I am the last and highest court of appeal in detection." ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "No, no: I never guess. It is a shocking habit,--destructive to the logical faculty." ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "I cannot live without brain-work. What else is there to live for?" ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Our father would never tell us what it was he feared, but he had a most marked aversion to men with wooden legs." ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Miss Morstan and I stood together, and her hand was in mine. A wondrous subtle thing is love, for here were we two who had never seen each other before that day, between whom no word or even look of affection had ever passed, and yet now in an hour of trouble our hands instinctively sought for each other. I have marvelled at it since, but at the time it seemed the most natural thing that I should go out to her so, and, as she has often told me, there was in her also the instinct to turn to me for comfort and protection. So we stood hand in hand, like two children, and there was peace in our hearts for all the dark things that surrounded us. ~ The Sign of The Four by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle