Julian Symons > Quotes

“The answer to this question, which is at the root of the tragi-comedy of Gordon, rests in the illogic of human conduct compared with rationality of human thought”
― Julian Symons, England's Pride: The Story of the Gordon Relief Expedition

“This also was routine, something that had been done and said ten thousand times in a hundred police stations, and Twicker, as he looked at Norman’s fleshy face set in its mask of good humour, and at Garney’s, in which fear was beginning to replace arrogance, felt nothing at all. Lies and tricks, threats and promises, these were the methods that brought results.”
― Julian Symons, The Progress of a Crime

“Before 1914, the external trappings of typical detective stories corresponded with the world outside. The big country house still existed, with its lengthy visits from friends and relations, its mild local entertainments, its shooting and fishing, its small army of servants, and its multiplicity of rooms, including the corpse-filled library”
― Julian Symons, Morttal Consequences

“It was, rather, as if the boy in the dock heard the boy in the witness box speaking for some outcast group of the inarticulate, as if in all these long proceedings that had been given their deliberate weight and pomp through centuries of precedent and subtle change, and in all these arguments conducted by the finest and fairest kind of legal logic, this animal defiance of Garney’s was for Leslie Gardner the only thing that made sense.”
― Julian Symons, The Progress of a Crime

“In considering Gordon's last months in Khartoum, one is sometimes reminded of the definition of a martyr as somebody who moves along a path of least resistance to a desired death.”
― Julian Symons, England's Pride: The Story of the Gordon Relief Expedition