Quotes from Laurie R. King

Whenever I go to England, I'm on pilgrimage. I walk the countryside around Eastbourne because that's where Sherlock Holmes retired.

However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the "Eureka!" comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.

My God...it can think.

Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery.

I took to the...Library as to a lover...

the first spring in five free from the rumour of guns across the Channel, a spring anxious to make up for the cold winter, life bursting out after four years of death. All of England raised her face to the sun. . .

in New York, a cat could look at a king. Hell, a cat could get himself elected king. But in England, where people had windows reminding them of ancestors whose bones had long since gone to dust? In England, the country that had perfected the art of the devastating remark? In England, where the servants' entrance waited, where all ears were tuned for the tiniest wrong accent, where the exquisitely subtle vocabulary of Us and Them held ten thousand complicated traps, uspoken and unarguable?

Guessing is a weakness brought on by indolence and should never be confused with intuition.

Interpreting the Bible without training is a bit like finding a specific address in a foreign city with neither map nor knowledge of the language. You might stumble upon the right answer, but in the meantime you've put yourself at the mercy of every ignoramus in town, with no way of telling the savant from the fool.

The house was still, weighty with the comfort of a thousand books.

I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of tools flying. Patrick picked up a chipped chisel and looked at me as if I had attacked his son. Have you never used a broom before?

I could never, I knew then, lose myself in love. Margery had accused me of coldness, and she was right, but she was also wrong: For me, for always, the paramount organ of passion was the mind. Unnatural, unbalanced, perhaps, but it was true: Without intellect, there could be no love.

Life has ill-prepared me for finding any enjoyment in a press of merrymakers.

A quick mind is worthless unless you can control the emotions with it as well.

The dead have a claim on us even heavier than that of the living, for they cannot hear our explanations, and we cannot ask their forgiveness.

I did not think of myself as a detective; I was a student of theology, and I was to spend my life in exploration, not of the darker crannies of human misbehaviour, but of the heights of human speculation concerning the nature of the Divine. That the two were not unrelated did not occur to me for years.

Why the devil was my husband positively grinning - and with what looked remarkably like relief?

Marsh looked at me sideways, causing a brief stir of familiarity. You liked the library? It was all I could do to keep her from bolting herself inside, Alistair told him. With mock indignation, I protested, I never even touched a book. I walked through and walked out. Her eyes were filled with an unnatural light, Alister confided in his cousin. I feared for my safety.

That's what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.

Youth does not inspire confidence, in life or in stories

Madam, there is no treachery in the truth. There may be pain, but to face honestly all possible conclusions formed by a set of facts is the noblest route possible for a human being." Holmes could be surprisingly empathetic at times

THE END OF a case is always long, tedious, and anticlimactic

Holmes, you're a genius. So I have been told.

Oddly enough, the very considerations that had made marriage impossible for him were mirrored in my own being: a rabidly independent nature, an impatience with lesser minds, total unconventionality, and the horror of being saddled with someone who would need cosseting and protection—the