The Moving Toyshop Quotes

“None but the most blindly credulous will imagine the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of England, the likeliest progenitor of unlikely events and persons. But there are limits.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“Well, I’m going to the police,’ said Cadogan. ‘If there’s anything I hate, it’s the sort of book in which characters don’t go to the police when they’ve no earthly reason for not doing so.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“Down the Woodstock Road towards them an elderly, abnormally thin man was pedalling, his thin white hair streaming in the wind and sheer desperation in his eyes. Immediately behind him, running for their lives, came Scylla and Charybdis; behind them, a milling, shouting rout of undergraduates, with Mr Adrian Barnaby (on a bicycle) well in the van; behind them, the junior proctor, the University Marshal, and two bullers, packed into a small Austin car and looking very elect, severe and ineffectual; and last of all, faint but pursuing, lumbered the ungainly form of Mr Hoskins.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“Indeed,' he said, tapping his fingers very rapidly on the desk. 'Indeed. I'm very pleased to know you, sir. Do me the honour of sitting down.'
Blinking reproachfully at Fen, Cadogan obeyed, though as to what honour he could be doing Mr Rosseter in lowering his behind on to a leather chair he was not entirely clear.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“What are you going to do with your self now?'...
'I? said Fen. 'I shall pursue my orderly and dignified progress towards the grave.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“Wordsworth or as modest as Hardy; as rich as Byron or as poor as Francis Thompson; as religious as Cowper or as pagan as Carew. It doesn’t matter what you believe; Shelley believed every lunatic idea under the sun. Keats was certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections. And I’m willing to bet, my dear Sally, that you could pass Shakespeare on the way to work every morning for twenty years without noticing him once…Good Lord, this is developing into a lecture.’ ‘Still, poets must be alike in some way.’ ‘Certainly they are. They all write poetry.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop: The intriguing, suspenseful, gripping, dark, humorous and cosy cozy classic detective fiction novel adored by Golden Age crime and ... mystery fans alike

“There’s something romantic about me,’ he added reflectively. ‘I’m an adventurer manqué: born out of my time.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“I?’ said Fen. ‘I shall pursue my orderly and dignified progress towards the grave.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“recall that the name character in that play makes at one point a remark to the effect that the native hue of resolution is too often sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and that moreover enterprises of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action. More briefly though less accurately (and remember, please, that poetry is nothing if not accurate), this means “Cut the cackle and get down to the horses.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop

“Om vijf minuten voor twaalf klonk er buiten een luid gebrul, gevolgd door een gerinkel als van oorlogvoerende steelpannetjes.”
― Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop