The Great Detective Quotes

“From the vantage of the early twenty-first century, it might be more accurate to say, with no disrespect, that Arthur Conan Doyle originated Sherlock Holmes. The rest of us, obviously, aren’t yet finished creating him.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“My London is a place where Samuel Johnson is forever running into the Sex Pistols.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“Stumbling upon this lost Holmesian doppelgänger is like learning that Elvis’s stillborn twin brother lived just long enough to record a single.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous. —RAYMOND CHANDLER, NOTEBOOKS”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“But consider how desperately we need this discipline right now. For a supposed Information Age, we drown in fact-twisting theory, misbegotten conclusions, and self-serving “analysis.” Spend five minutes on any newspaper’s online comment section and you will find a sterling example of anti-Sherlockian thinking. Whenever an eminent figure denies that carbon dioxide emissions disrupt the atmosphere; whenever someone says biological evolution is “just a theory”; whenever an all-caps email foists elaborate conspiracies orchestrated by mundane federal government departments—such assertions constitute metaphorical slaps to the face of Sherlock Holmes.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“The interplay of ideas and the oblique uses of knowledge are often of extraordinary interest.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“Learn some single-stick, treat yourself to a Turkish bath and dinner in the Strand when you can, and keep a handy reference librarian or a reformed underworld thug on call. Act boldly. Be discreet. Uphold standards.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“We all hear the howl of the Hound sometimes. The trick is to listen more closely, think clearly, and get out of the fog.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“Bell had developed the Method from his youth and considered it a core medical skill. “All careful teachers have first to show the student how to recognize accurately the case,” he would declare. This was best done with the doctor’s own eyes, informed by experience. Patients, after all, could lie or misperceive their own symptoms. A man with a long-term injury might fail to recognize how his work did him damage; a drunkard might conceal his consumption. For Bell, observation sliced straight to the bone of diagnostic truth. It was all about trifles: “the accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the disease differs from the healthy state.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“The rain had beaten against the windows, so that even here in the heart of great, hand-made London we were forced to raise our minds for the instant from the routine of life and to recognize the presence of those great elemental forces which shriek at mankind through the bars of his civilization, like untamed beasts in a cage.” And”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“In director Guy Ritchie’s entertainingly bumptious movies for Warner Bros., Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law ricochet around a grimy Victorian-ish London replete with slow-motion fight scenes and massive exploding fireballs. (Watching those movies is like huffing gasified cotton candy, but the world loves them.”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes

“There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Neither is independent of the other or more important than the other. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery. The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.   —RAYMOND CHANDLER, NOTEBOOKS”
― Zach Dundas, The Great Detective: The Amazing Rise and Immortal Life of Sherlock Holmes