“It is simplicity itself. When you bared your arm to draw that fish into the boat I saw that J. A. had been tattooed in the bend of the elbow. The letters were still legible, but it was perfectly clear from their blurred appearance, and from the staining of the skin round them, that efforts had been made to obliterate them. It was obvious, then, that those initials had once been very familiar to you, and that you had afterwards wished to forget them.”
—The “Gloria Scott”
“She is the daintiest thing under a bonnet on this planet.”
—A Scandal in Bohemia
“One of the most dangerous classes in the world’s the drifting and friendless woman. She is the most harmless and often the most useful of mortals, but she is the inevitable inciter of crime in others. She is helpless. She is migratory. She has sufficient means to take her from country to country and from hotel to hotel. She is lost, as often as not, in a maze of obscure pensions and boarding-houses. She is a stray chicken in a world of foxes. When she is gobbled up she is hardly missed.”
—The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
“This is the Dundas separation case, and, as it happens, I was engaged in clearing up some small points in connection with it. The husband was a teetotaler, there was no other woman, and the conduct complained of was that he had drifted into the habit of winding up every meal by taking out his false teeth and hurling them at his wife, which, you will allow, is not an action likely to occur to the imagination of the average story-teller.”
—A Case of Identity
“There is one correspondent who is a sure draw, Watson. That is the bank. Single ladies must live, and their passbooks are compressed diaries.”
—The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
“It is part of the settled order of nature that such a girl should have followers.”
—The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist
“She has flown to tea as an agitated woman will.”
—The Crooked Man
“Women are naturally secretive, and they like to do their own secreting.”
—A Scandal in Bohemia
“I am not a whole-souled admirer of womankind … but my experience of life has taught me that there are few wives, having any regard for their husbands, who would let any man’s spoken word stand between them and that husband’s dead body. Should I ever marry, Watson, I should hope to inspire my wife with some feeling which would prevent her from being walked off by a housekeeper when my corpse was lying within a few yards of her.”
—The Valley of Fear
“I confess that it is not the situation which I should like to see a sister of mine apply for.”
—The Adventure of the Copper Beeches
“The lady’s charming personality must not be permitted to warp our judgment.”
—The Adventure of the Abbey Grange
“A woman of Spanish blood does not condone such an injury so lightly.”
—The Hound of the Baskervilles
“And yet the motives of women are so inscrutable. You remember the woman at Margate whom I suspected for the same reason. No powder on her nose—that proved to be the correct solution. How can you build on such a quicksand? Their most trivial action may mean volumes, or their most extraordinary conduct may depend upon a hairpin or a curling tongs.”
—The Adventure of the Second Stain
“I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”
—The Sign of Four
“A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman’s love, however badly he may have treated her.”
—The Musgrave Ritual
“Now, when young ladies wander about the metropolis at this hour of the morning, and knock sleepy people up out of their beds, I presume that it is something very pressing which they have to communicate.”
—The Adventure of the Speckled Band
“I have seen too much not to know that the impression of a woman may be more valuable than the conclusion of an analytical reasoner.”
—The Man with the Twisted Lip
“No woman would ever send a reply-paid telegram. She would have come.”
—The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge
“All my instincts tell me that she is in London, but as we have at present no possible means of telling where, we can only take the obvious steps, eat our dinner, and possess our souls in patience.”
—The Disappearance of Lady Frances Carfax
“Women are never to be entirely trusted—not the best of them.”
—The Sign of Four
“When a woman has been seriously wronged by a man she no longer oscillates, and the usual symptom is a broken bell wire.”
—A Case of Identity
