Locked Rooms Quotes

“No doubt after the emperor was overthrown in 1911, your gardener would have joined the rest of the world in cutting the queue and taking on the laws and customs of his adoptive land. Before that, his assuming Western dress would have been dangerous for his family in China.”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“Why was the mind said to have an eye and not a hand, or a tongue? Perhaps touch, taste, odour, sound were linked to the heart rather than the intellect.”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“This threatens to become a circular argument,” Holmes said. “I know it’s there because it’s all that explains the facts. My wife tells me that astronomers posit the existence of an invisible planet by the effects it has on the orbit of other celestial bodies. Thus do I posit the existence of this object.”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“fish”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“My lunch consisted of a glass of wine (which the waiter solemnly called “grape juice”)”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“The police feared riot and disorder so much, it was ordered that any person caught looting would be shot on sight--with no suggestion as to how the soldier or policeman might tell if the person in his sights was a looter or a rightful home-owner. (Locked Rooms, chapter 8.)”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“Mr Hammett, you have a way with the American vernacular that bodes well for your future as a writer of popular fiction. [Locked Rooms, chapter 11]”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“ratiocination.”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“And why was this third dream still with me, lingering at my shoulder like some telegraph boy awaiting a reply?”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“The water stretched out as far as the eye could see in an expanse of gentle grey-blue swells broken only by the occasional white-capped wavelet and the line of the ship’s passage, unrolling die-straight behind us until it faded into the glare of sun on the western horizon. Directly below where I stood, dominating my vision if I leant my upper body over the rail, the churn of the great screws dug an indentation in the surface, followed by a rise just behind. Like the earth from a farmer’s plough, I thought dreamily, cutting a straight furrow across three thousand miles of sea. And when the ship reached the end of its watery field, it would turn and begin the next furrow, heading east; and after reaching that far shore it would shift again, ploughing west. Back and forth, to and fro, and all the while, beneath the surface the marine equivalents of earthworms and moles would be going busily about their work, oblivious of the other world above their heads. The farmer, the ship, above; the insect, the fish, below. So peaceful. Peacefully sleeping, while occasionally a seed would fall and take root in the freshly split furrow …”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“were she not aware that he was more than a man who could make plants grow. And”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“Pray tell,” she said, although her voice told him not to.

He ignored her tone, let out a thoughtful cloud of smoke, and said, ...”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms

“AND DEAD SEA”
― Laurie R. King, Locked Rooms