Quotes
In fact Holmes is extraordinarily romantic. On one level he is a successful consulting detective who operates according to strict Victorian scientific principles; on another he is a fragile personality whose unpredictable behaviour reflects something of the fin de siecle anxiety that was beginning to emerge in British culture. (xiv, Introduction)
Read it up - you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before. (30, A Study in Scarlet)
'What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence,' returned my campanion, bitterly. 'The question is, what can you make people believe that you have done.' (122, A Study in Scarlet)
Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantelpiece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case...his eyes rested thoughtfully upon [his] sinewy farearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. (133, The Sign of Four)
'Which is it to-day,' I [Dr Watson] asked, 'morphine or cocaine?''...
'It is cocaine,' he [Sherlock Holmes] said, 'a seven-per-cent solution. Woul you care to try it?' (133, The Sign of Four)
What is the use of having powers, Doctor, when one has no field upon which to exert them? Crime is commonplace, existence is commonplace, and no qualities save those which are commonplace have any function upon earth. (140, The Sign of Four)
How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (171, The Sign of Four)
'The division seems rather unfair,' I remarked. 'You have done all the work in this business. I get a wife out of it, Jones gets the credit, pray what remains for you?'
'For me,' said Sherlock Holmes, 'there still remains the cocaine-bottle.' (244, The Sign of Four)
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes. (272, The Hound of The Baskervilles)
Evil indeed is the man who has not one woman to mourn him. (376, The Hound of The Baskervilles)
I have not heard him [Sherlock Holmes] laugh often, and it has always boded ill to somebody. (379, The Hound of The Baskervilles)