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Mystery Quotes
"No one is so modest as not to believe himself a competent amateur sleuth..."
"He just waited until I stopped talking and said, 'Jesus, kid, you're almost a detective. All you need now is a gun, a gut, and three ex-wives. So what's your theory?"
"There isnt always an explanation for everything."
"It is romantic, yes,' agreed Hercule Poirot. 'It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun'."
"Any thing or behavior too complex to understand becomes a phenomenon that could be termed spiritual or magical."
"Her sleep was enlivened by several dreams. One where Professor Wanstead's bushy eyebrows fell off because they were not his own eyebrows, but false ones. As she woke again, her first impression was that which often follows dreams, a belief that the dream in question had solved everything. 'Of course,' she thought, 'of course!' His eyebrows were false and that solved the whole thing. He was the criminal."
"Miss Howard: Like a good detective story myself. Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last Chapter. Everyone dumbfounded. Real crime - you'd know at once."
"A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound."
"I brought the newspaper close up to my eyes to get a better view of George Pollucci's face, spotlighted like a three-quarter moon against a vague background of brick and black sky. I felt he had something important to tell me, and that whatever it was might just be written on his face.But the smudgy crags of George Pollucci's features melted away as I peered at them, and resolved themselves into a regular pattern of dark and light and medium gray dots.The inky black newspaper paragraph didn't tell why Mr Pollucci was on the ledge, or what Sgt Kilmartin did to him when he finally got him in through the window."
"It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again.""Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant."
"What's happening here?" This last bit was hissed to Ronan and Noah. "Noah took a personal day.""I lost..." Noah struggled for words. "There wasn't air. It went away. The - the line!""The ley line?" Gansey asked.Noah nodded once, a sloppy thing that was sort of a shrug at the same time. "There was nothing ... left for me." Releasing Ronan, he shook out his hands. "You're welcome, man," Ronan snarled. He still couldn't feel his toes."Thanks. I didn't mean to ... you were there. Oh, the glitter.""Yes," Ronan replied crossly. "The glitter."
"The house in the story is based on my friend Tori's house in Kinsale, Ireland, which is obviously not actually haunted, and the sound of people upstairs moving wardrobes around when you are downstairs there and alone is probably just something that old houses do when they think they are unobserved."
"I'm sure when you run it through the interweb just now, or if you are from a military ship, through your own database " you will see that you have stumbled across a relic of one of those great mysteries of deep space, and probably one of those missing ships people like to write spooky stories about. Well, whatever they wrote, buddy, they got it wrong. You can take it from me."
"Those places where sadness and misery abound are favoured settings for stories of ghosts and apparitions. Calcutta has countless such stories hidden in its darkness, stories that nobody wants to admit they believe but which nevertheless survive in the memory of generations as the only chronicle of the past. It is as if the people who inhabit the streets, inspired by some mysterious wisdom, relalise that the true history of Calcutta has always been written in the invisible tales of its spirits and unspoken curses."
"Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead."
"Surely we cannot take an open question like the supernatural and shut it with a bang, turning the key of the madhouse on all the mystics of history. You cannot take the region of the unknown and calmly say that, though you know nothing about it, you know all the gates are locked. We do not know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable."
"I like a good detective story," he said. "But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that-years before sometimes with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day."
"All the supernatural yarns need a realist explanation and a supernatural one."
"Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery."
"If the lost word is lost, if the spent word is spentIf the unheard, unspokenWord is unspoken, unheard;Still is the spoken word, the Word unheard,The Word without a word, the Word withinThe world and for the world;And the light shone in the darkness andAgainst the Word the unstilled world still whirledAbout the center of the silent Word.Oh my people, what have I done unto thee.Where shall the word be found, where shall the wordResound? Not here, there is not enough silence."
"And anyway who the devil should I want to murder?""That would be a very good question," said Miss Marple. "I have not yet had the pleasure of sufficient conversation with you to evolve a theory as to that."Mr. Rafter's smile broadened."Conversations with you might be dangerous," he said."Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide," said Miss Marple."
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