Quotes from Ellery Queen

The two women exchanged the kind of glance women use when no knife is handy.

O wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee Death."*

Ellery Queen was here probably paraphrasing the Shakespearian quotation: "O thou invisible spirit of wine, if thou hast no name to be known by, let us call thee devil.

My dear Pepper," said Ellery, "that is the curse of my composition. I'm always thinking. I'm pursued by what Byron in Childe Harold—you recall that magnificent first canto?—saw fit to call, 'The blight of life—the demon Thought.

God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty. …

Who fills an office must learn to bear reproach and blame.

Have patience and endure; this unhappiness will one day be beneficial.

You never know anything until you've proved it right." "Nonsense. You can't order life mathematically," retorted the Judge. "Most of the time you 'know' things without factual evidence." "I'm Coleridge's 'thought-benighted skeptic,'" said Ellery unhappily. "I question everything. Sometimes I even question the results of my own thinking. My mental life is very involved.

A wise scepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

There is pattern but no logic in criminality. It is your task to cohere confusion, to bring order out of chaos.

is the peculiar gift of the truly great detective that he can apply to the inexorable rules of logic three catalyzers: an abnormal observation of events, a knowledge of the human mind and an insight into the human heart.

Oh, no, that would have been rude. I don't believe in that sort of tit for tat, do you? People are too self-centeredly unkind to one another as it is.

because a man is always a fool until he is made to realize the extent of his folly

It was wrong. It was like arresting the gun for murder.

The girl was kind in a special way; when you spoke to her, she seemed to stop thinking of whatever she been thinking and listened to you altogether.

Had Walter ever read Bernard Shaw (he had not), he might have been pleased with the line, "When you have learned something, my dear, it often feels at first as if you had lost something.

My very revered father, I am beginning to think that - Well, there's little peace in this world for a quiet book-loving man.

He was startled, but there was that about him which made it impossible to show what he felt, an instant and utter reflex of stillness to counteract all outward evidence of surprise, fear, anything.

The place smelled male, not the metal-and-soap maleness of a locker room nor the malt-and-sawdust maleness of an old-time corner saloon, but the leather-and-oiled-wood maleness of a city club, as finished and self-consistent as the ash of a fine cigar. At sight of the skirted figure stalking him, the sole visible attendant took refuge behind a showcase; surely a giraffe, were it a male one, would have startled him less.

Why did people do it? Why this herd curiosity about a street, a house, windows, doors? He was a public servant, the Inspector mused, but there were times when he would enjoy loading all the rubbernecks onto barges and towing them out to sea to be served, with ceremony, to sharks.

If it pains you to discover that a Nice Man can be a crumbum, Tom, it's life you've got to object to, not Percy in particular.

Now, Jehovah, Yahweh, was a member of no Trinity, was represented by no lambs, suffered no little children. He was an almighty vindictive deity. He meddled in individual lives. And He was always right because He was.

Now, now," said Ellery with a smile. "Surely that's overheated imagination, Jenny? I thought ghosts are indigenous only to old English castles.

For remember always the maxim: He who would know right must first know wrong!