“No wind and not a cloud in the sky. I have a easeful of cigarettes here which need smoking, and the sofa is very much superior to the usual country hotel abomination.”
—The Boscombe Valley Mystery
“Well, I gave my mind a thorough rest by plunging into a chemical analysis. One of our greatest statesmen has said that a change of work is the best rest. So it is.”
—The Sign of Four
“At present I am, as you know, fairly busy, but I propose to devote my declining years to the composition of a textbook which shall focus the whole art of detection into one volume.”
—The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
“No: I am not tired. I have a curious constitution. I never remember feeling tired by work, though idleness exhausts me completely.”
—The Sign of Four
“Yes, there are in me the makings of a very fine loafer, and also of a pretty spry sort of fellow. I often think of those lines of old Goethe: ‘Schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf, Denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff.’”
—The Sign of Four
“It immensely adds to the zest of an investigation, my dear Mr. Mac, when one is in conscious sympathy with the historical atmosphere of one’s surroundings.”
—The Valley of Fear
“My ramifications stretch out into many sections of society, but never, I am happy to say, into amateur sport, which is the best and soundest thing in England.”
—The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter
“It is nearly nine, and the landlady babbled of green peas at seven-thirty.”
—The Adventure of the Three Students
“I traveled for two years in Tibet, therefore, and amused myself by visiting Lhassa, and spending some days with the head lama. You may have read of the remarkable explorations of a Norwegian named Sigerson, but I am sure that it never occurred to you that you were receiving news of your friend. I then passed through Persia, looked in at Mecca, and paid a short but interesting visit to the Khalifa at Khartoum, the results of which I have communicated to the Foreign Office. Returning to France, I spent some months in a research into the coal-tar derivatives, which I conducted in a laboratory at Montpellier, in the south of France.”
—The Adventure of the Empty House
“For me, there still remains the cocaine-bottle.”
—The Sign of Four
“The thing takes shape. It becomes coherent. Might I ask you to hand me my violin, and we will postpone all further thought upon this business until the morning.”
—The Hound of the Baskervilles
“I get so little active exercise that it is always a treat. You are aware that I have some proficiency in the good old British sport of boxing. Occasionally, it is of service; to-day, for example, I should have come to very ignominious grief without it.”
—The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
“Here is the fruit of my leisured ease, the magnum opus of my latter years, Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, with Some Observations upon the Segregation of the Queen. Alone I did it. Behold the fruit of pensive nights and laborious days when I watched the little working gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.”
—His Last Bow
“I suppose that its influence is physically a bad one. I find it, however, so transcendently stimulating and clarifying to the mind that its secondary action is a matter of small moment.”
—The Sign of Four
“I suppose, that you imagine that I have added opium smoking to cocaine injections, and all the other little weaknesses on which you have favored me with your medical views.”
—The Man with the Twisted Lip
“Draw your chair up and hand me my violin, for the only problem we have still to solve is how to while away these bleak autumnal evenings.”
—The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor
“How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”
—The Sign of Four
“And now for lunch, and then for Norman Neruda. Her attack and her bowing are splendid. What’s that little thing of Chopin’s she plays so magnificently: Tra-la-la-lira-lira-lay.”
—A Study in Scarlet
“When we have finished at the police-station I think that something nutritious at Simpson’s would not be out of place.”
—The Adventure of the Dying Detective
“Meanwhile, we shall put the case aside until more accurate data are available, and devote the rest of our morning to the pursuit of Neolithic man.”
—The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot
