The Golden Spiders Quotes

“The sight of a pretty girl provokes in him an overwhelming reaction of appreciation and approval, and correlatively his acquisitive instinct, but he has never married. Why not? Because he knows that if he had a wife, his reaction to pretty girls, now pure and frank and free, would not only be intolerably adulterated but would also be under surveillance and subject to restriction by authority. So the governor always stops him short of disaster.”
― Rex Stout, Golden Spiders

“Learning will never hurt you. Only the man who knows too little knows too much. It is only when you undertake to use what you have learned that you discover whether you can transform knowledge into performance.”
― Rex Stout, The Golden Spiders

“Science in detection can be distinguished, even brilliant, but it can never replace either the inexorable march of a fine intellect through a jungle of lies and fears to the clearing of truth, or the flash of perception along a sensitive nerve touched off by a tone of a voice or a flicker of an eye.”
― Rex Stout, The Golden Spiders

“Take Mr. Goodwin. It would be difficult for me to function effectively without him. He is irreplaceable. Yet his actions are largely governed by impulse and caprice, and that would of course incapacitate him for any important task if it were not that he has somewhere concealed in him—possibly in his brain, though I doubt it—a powerful and subtle governor.”
― Rex Stout, The Golden Spiders

“As I stirred I was thinking that if she was hoping for any cooperation from Wolfe it was too bad she had asked for gin, since in his book all gin drinkers were barbarians.”
― Rex Stout, The Golden Spiders