Sarah > Sarah's Quotes

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobbledstreets silent and the hunched courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.”
― Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood

“I only want to live in peace, plant potatoes and dream!”
― Tove Jansson, Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Vol. 01

“My bag was as light as my happy-go-lucky heart.”
― Tove Jansson, Travelling Light

“All things are so very uncertain, and that's exactly what makes me feel reassured.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

“There's no need to imagine that you're a wondrous beauty, because that's what you are.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“When you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes

“You see, but you do not observe.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia

“Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“My name is Sherlock Holmes. It is my business to know what other people do not know.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle - a Sherlock Holmes Short Story

“I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Lion's Mane

“Watson. Come at once if convenient. If inconvenient, come all the same.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Adventure of the Creeping Man

“Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Our chambers were always full of chemicals and of criminal relics which had a way of wandering into unlikely positions, and of turning up in the butter-dish or in even less desirable places. But his papers were my great crux. He had a horror of destroying documents, especially those which were connected with his past cases, and yet it was only once in every year or two that he would muster energy to docket and arrange them; for, as I have mentioned somewhere in these incoherent memoirs, the outbursts of passionate energy when he performed the remarkable feats with which his name is associated were followed by reactions of lethargy during which he would lie about with his violin and his books, hardly moving save from the sofa to the table. Thus month after month his papers accumulated, until every corner of the room was stacked with bundles of manuscript which were on no account to be burned, and which could not be put away save by their owner. One winter's night, as we sat together by the fire, I ventured to suggest to him that, as he had finished pasting extracts into his common-place book, he might employ the next two hours in making our room a little more habitable. He could not deny the justice of my request, so with a rather rueful face he went off to his bedroom, from which he returned presently pulling a large tin box behind him. This he placed in the middle of the floor and, squatting down upon a stool in front of it, he threw back the lid. I could see that it was already a third full of bundles of paper tied up with red tape into separate packages.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“From within he produced a crumpled piece of paper, and old-fashioned brass key, a peg of wood with a ball of string attached to it, and three rusty old disks of metal.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“I found myself regarding him as an isolated phenomenon, a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was pre-eminent in intelligence.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

“The Diogenes Club is the queerest club in London, and Mycroft one of the queerest men. He's always there from quarter to five to twenty to eight. It's six now, so if you care for a stroll this beautiful evening I shall be very happy to introduce you to two curiosities.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

“Robes, dresses, frocks. They hung in endless rows, in hundreds, one beside the other all around the room - gleaming brocade, fluffy clouds of tulle and swansdown, flowery silk, night-black velvet with glittering spangles everywhere like small, many-coloured blinker beacons.”
― Tove Jansson, Moominsummer Madness

“Three o'clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre , Nausea

“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. ”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do. There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do. Wasting time is merely an occupation then, and a most exhausting one. Idleness, like kisses, to be sweet must be stolen.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“It is always the best policy to tell the truth, unless of course you are an exceptionally good liar.”
― Jerome K. Jerome

“I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“It is very strange, this domination of our intellect by our digestive organs. We cannot work, we cannot think, unless our stomach wills so. It dictates to us our emotions, our passions. After eggs and bacon it says, "Work!" After beefsteak and porter, it says, "Sleep!" After a cup of tea (two spoonfuls for each cup, and don't let it stand for more than three minutes), it says to the brain, "Now rise, and show your strength. Be eloquent, and deep, and tender; see, with a clear eye, into Nature, and into life: spread your white wings of quivering thought, and soar, a god-like spirit, over the whirling world beneath you, up through long lanes of flaming stars to the gates of eternity!”
― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

“We like, we cherish, we are very, very fond of—but we never love again.”
― Jerome K.

“Cultivate," I said, "a sense of humor. From a humorous point of view this lunch is rather good.”
― Jerome K. Jerome, They And I