Graham Moore > Quotes

“Be alone—that is the secret of invention: be alone, that is when ideas are born. —NIKOLA TESLA, FROM HIS DIARY A”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Look, I get it. I’m a white, heterosexual man. It’s really easy for me to say, ‘Oh, wow, wasn’t the nineteenth century terrific?’ But try this. Imagine the scene: It’s pouring rain against a thick window. Outside, on Baker Street, the light from the gas lamps is so weak that it barely reaches the pavement. A fog swirls in the air, and the gas gives it a pale yellow glow. Mystery brews in every darkened corner, in every darkened room. And a man steps out into that dim, foggy world, and he can tell you the story of your life by the cut of your shirtsleeves. He can shine a light into the dimness, with only his intellect and his tobacco smoke to help him. Now. Tell me that’s not awfully romantic?”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Poor people all think they deserve to be rich,” he continued. “Rich people live every day with the uneasy knowledge that we do not.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“In the darkest corner of a darkened room, all Sherlock Homes stories begin. In the pregnant dim of gaslight and smoke, Holmes would sit, digesting the day's papers, puffing on his long pipe, injecting himself with cocaine. He would pop smoke rings into the gloom, waiting for something, anything, to pierce into the belly of his study and release the promise of adventure; of clues to interpret; of, at last he would plead, a puzzle he could not solve. And after each story he would return here, into the dark room, and die day by day of boredom. The darkness of his study was his cage, but also the womb of his genius.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“[On writing more Sherlock Holmes stories.] ‘I don’t care whether you do or not,’ said Bram. ‘But you will, eventually. He’s yours, till death do you part. Did you really think he was dead and gone when you wrote “The Final Problem”? I don’t think you did. I think you always knew he’d be back. But whenever you take up your pen and continue, heed my advice. Don’t bring him here. Don’t bring Sherlock Holmes into the electric light. Leave him in the mysterious and romantic flicker of the gas lamp. He won’t stand next to this, do you see? The glare would melt him away. He was more the man of our time than Oscar was. Or than we were. Leave him where he belongs, in the last days of our bygone century. Because in a hundred years, no one will care about me. Or you. Or Oscar. We stopped caring about Oscar years ago, and we were his bloody *friends.* No, what they’ll remember are the stories. They’ll remember Holmes. And Watson. And Dorian Gray.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“One doesn't lie down with a lion and get to act surprised if one finds oneself devoured.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“I believe it is worthwhile trying to discover more about the world, even if this only teaches us how little we know.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Amazing, really, to think of what a man could achieve with the simple ability to put pen to paper and spin a decent yarn.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“The human mind thrills at few things so much as making connections. Discovering. Solving.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“His genius was not in inventing; rather, it was in inventing a system of invention.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Realism, I think, is fleeting. It's the romance that will live forever.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Why, of course, if the reader were smart enough, he could figure the whole thing through after just the first few pages! But in his heart Arthur knew that his readers didn't really want to win. They wanted to test their wits against the author at full pitch, and they wanted to lose. To be dazzled.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Light bulbs. Electricity. It seems likely that ours will be the last generation to ever gaze, wide-eyed, at something truly novel. That our kind will be the last to ever stare in disbelief at a man-made thing that could not possibly exist. We made wonders, boys. I only wonder how many of them are left to make.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious….He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. —ALBERT EINSTEIN”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“The moment you stop bargaining is the last in which you're ever given a thing.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“It takes a shock to the system, doesn't it, to make a man realize what good things he has.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Always remember that it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood: There will always be some who misunderstand you. —”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Watson is a cheap, efficient little sod of a literary device. Holmes doesn't need him to solve crimes any more than he needs a ten-stone ankle weight. The audience, Arthur. The audience needs Watson as an intermediary, so that Holmes's thoughts might be forever kept just out of reach. If you told stories from Holmes's perspective, everyone would know what the bleeding genius was thinking the whole time. They'd have the culprit fingered on page one.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Refraction, he called it. The way light is broken up into component colors when it passes through a prism. I felt like a refraction of a person. So many different shades that layer to create the illusion of a solid thing.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Murder was so trivial in the stories Harold loved. Dead bodies were plot points, puzzles to be reasoned out. They weren't brothers. Plot points didn't leave behind grieving sisters who couldn't find their shoes.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Paul had always wanted to be a prodigy. But what no one ever told him was that prodigies don’t feel like prodigies; they feel old. They feel like has-beens just at the moment that they’re said to be blossoming.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“There is an undeniable exhilaration in moment of even the smallest discovery”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“On Westminster Bridge, Arthur was struck by the brightness of the streetlamps running across like a formation of stars. They shone white against the black coats of the marching gentlefold and fuller than the moon against the fractal spires of Westminster. They were, Arthur quickly realized, the new electric lights, which the city government was installing, avenue by avenue, square by square, in place of the dirty gas lamps that had lit London's public spaces for a century. These new electric ones were brighter. They were cheaper. They required less maintenance. And they shone farther into the dime evening, exposing every crack in the pavement, every plump turtle sheel of stone underfoot. So long to the faint chiaroscuro of London, to the ladies and gentlemen in black-on-black relief. So long to the era of mist and carbonized Newcastle coal, to the stench of the Blackfriars foundry. Welcome to the cleasing glare of the twentieth century.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“The adversarial system,” that’s what it was called. The attorneys on each side did their best to win, no-holds-barred—and whatever emerged from the mess of broken limbs was called justice.”
― Graham Moore, The Holdout

“Paul was an attorney. And this was what his as yet brief career in the law had done to his brain. He was comforted by minutiae. His mortal fears could be assuaged only by an encyclopedic command of detail. Paul was a professional builder of narratives. He was a teller of concise tales. His work was to take a series of isolated events and, shearing from them their dross, craft from them a progression. The morning’s discrete images—a routine labor, a clumsy error, a grasping arm, a crowded street, a spark of fire, a blood-speckled child, a dripping corpse—could be assembled into a story. There would be a beginning, a middle, and an end. Stories reach conclusions, and then they go away. Such is their desperately needed magic. That day’s story, once told in his mind, could be wrapped up, put aside, and recalled only when necessary. The properly assembled narrative would guard his mind from the terror of raw memory. Even a true story is a fiction, Paul knew. It is the comforting tool we use to organize the chaotic world around us into something comprehensible. It is the cognitive machine that separates the wheat of emotion from the chaff of sensation. The real world is overfull with incidents, brimming over with occurrences. In our stories, we disregard most of them until clear reason and motivation emerge. Every story is an invention, a technological device not unlike the very one that on that morning had seared a man’s skin from his bones. A good story could be put to no less dangerous a purpose. As an attorney, the tales that Paul told were moral ones. There existed, in his narratives, only the injured and their abusers. The slandered and the liars. The swindled and the thieves. Paul constructed these characters painstakingly until the righteousness of his plaintiff—or his defendant—became overwhelming. It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable. That was the business of Paul’s stories: to present an undeniable view of the world. And then to vanish, once the world had been so organized and a profit fairly earned.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Paranoid theorizing was too easy, too emotionally satisfying.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Arthur narrowly avoided tripping over his own skirt as he hurried out of the ladies’ powder room in full pursuit.”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“Harold had become, over the past week, a connoisseur of silences. He was an expert at differentiating the particulars; was this a Tranquil Silence, marked by slow sighs and peaceful smiles? Or was it a Tired Silence, marked by ornery chair shifting? Or a Tense Silence, full of tight breaths and cautious glances?”
― Graham Moore, The Sherlockian

“It was not the job of a litigator to determine facts; it was his job to construct a story from those facts by which a clear moral conclusion would be unavoidable.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night

“Sometimes I hate it so much,” she said. “Always having to pretend.” Paul gripped her fingers tighter. “This is America,” he said. “We’re all pretending.”
― Graham Moore, The Last Days of Night