Quotes from Seabury Quinn

Certainly, de Grandin was not the first occult detective—Algernon Blackwood's John Silence, Hodgson's Thomas Carnacki, and Sax Rohmer's Moris Klaw preceded him—nor was he the last, as Wellman's John Thunstone, Margery Lawrence's Miles Pennoyer, and Joseph Payne Brennan's Lucius Leffing all either overlapped with the end of de Grandin's run or followed him.

Moreover, he was deeply versed in demonology, and could smell wizardry or witchcraft featly as the beagle scents the cony, so when he spake he spake with great authority, and thus he spake to the Burggraf:

It is the way of life. We are born in others' pain; we perish in our own, and between beginning and end stands the physician. We help them into the world, we watch beside their sickbeds, we make their exits into immortality as painless as possible - at the last we stay to comfort those who remain. These are the obligations of our trade.

The man who will demand ten signatures upon a promissory note and look askance at you if you tell him of interplanetary distances, will swallow any idle fable, no matter how absurd, if it be boldly asserted and surrounded with sufficient nonsensical mummery and labeled as a religion.

Everything is natural, though if we do not know, or if we misread nature's laws, we falsely call it otherwise. Consider: Fifty years ago a man beholding the radio would have called it supernatural, yet the laws of physics governing the device were known as well then as now. But their application had not yet been learned.

Me, I know the by-ways of ghostland as I know my own pocket, and I solemnly assure you there is no such thing as the supernatural. There is undoubtedly the superphysical; there is also that class of natural phenomena which we do not understand; but the supernatural? Non, it is not so.

Always there is something of interest to be seen if one but knows where to look for it.

the learned holy men knew more of sacred things than this wild woman of the camps who wore her hair at shoulder length and fared forth dight in hose and doublet like a man

Reason is a makeshift thing, at best. We have used it but a scant half-million years; our instincts reach back to the days when we crawled in primeval ooze. Trust instinct.

Only two kinds of people can not change their minds, my friend, the foolish and the dead.

My business is to know things, especially things which I am not supposed to know.

A milligram of caution is worth a double quintal of remorse, so let us step warily.

Le parole rimangiate sono amare sulla lingua. (La dimora del sacrilego incantesimo)

Mais c'est renfantillage - this is childishness!' we heard de Grandin pant as we closed in and sought a chance to seize his skeleton-like antagonist. 'He who fights an imp of Satan as if he were human is a fool!' ("The Man In Crescent Terrace")