Quotes from Edmund Crispin

A Johnsonian portentousness emanated from him.

I believe that many of the boys have a lurking fear that their parents will disgrace them in some fashion.

meaningless piety, she knew – but to be always meaningful makes a cold world.

And the parents, of course, are aware of this. The fathers come here anxious to look intelligent, amiable and prosperous; the mothers put on their best frocks and hope that their sons' friends will think them young-looking, attractive, well turned out .

the masters, robed, gowned, their attitudes varying from indulgent ennui to virtual coma.

everyone clapped, in metronomic spasms.

Mr Philpotts was a chemistry master whose principal characteristic lay in a sort of unfocused vehemence

He was a small, stringy man of about fifty, with immense horn-rimmed spectacles, a long, sharp nose, and an unusual capacity for garrulous incoherence.

He says he went for a walk, and didn't get home till 11.45. I distrust people,' Stagge added peevishly, 'who go for walks at night. It isn't natural.

The afternoon wore away.

Soames, for example, who suddenly broke away after twenty years' teaching and went off to be jokes editor to a firm of matchbox manufacturers.

Miss Parry was gazing at this scene, in an attempt to dispel the mental indigestion occasioned by reading thirty consecutive essays on the pontificate of Leo X

THE majority of us are permitted to cope with the important events of our lives in a decently leisurely manner – with ample breathing-space, that is to say, in which to assimilate one shock and recuperate before the next.

At breakfast-time, however, destiny's preparations were still not quite complete

He was a tall, burly, youngish man in plain clothes whose features some freak of heredity had assembled into a perpetual expression of muted alarm, so that to be in his company was like consorting with a man dogged by assassins.

Boys wandered about in a condition of unnatural civility

I find it worth while to help clean up the mess made by malevolence and folly. But I do try not to like the mess for its own sake.

bruscas sacudidas del tren abofetean a los viajeros hasta dejarlos sumidos en un estado de abyecta sumisión

la pobre virgencita rústica que espera que su caballero deje de hacer el tonto con la princesa malvada

What's more, I don't believe any policeman uses words like "antonym". I don't believe you're a policeman at all.

Scotland Yard isn't called in nearly as often as detective novelists seem to think

What he said was, they're finding so many new groups and sub-groups that in ten or twenty years you'll be able to identify a chap straight away just by his blood, like as if it was his fingerprints.

Heavens, how I detest change! I sometimes think that change, and change alone, is the source of all misery. No doubt Eden was quite static and lethargic.

I'm inclined to think,' said Fen, 'that neither opposing nor advocating change makes much difference to the sum total of human misery. History suggests that it stays constant in quantity, if not in kind. Science rids us of plague but endows us with the atom bomb. Humanitarianism rids us of sweated labour but offers us the horrors of political agitation in its place. There's a choice of evils, but that's all.