Quotes About Investigation

Until you work backwards from the moments, hours or days before the actual mistake occured, you probably won't see all of the contributing factors and can't learn all of the possible lessons. The more complex the mistake, the further back you'll need to go and the more careful and open-minded you need to be in your own investigation.

What was that smell? Had someone left food in here? She looked under the desktop, then under the chair before she realized what it was. The smell was her.

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.

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

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

It doesn't include math or logic, nor does it address issues of judgment, such as aesthetics or morality. Science has a simple goal: to figure out what the world actually is. Not all the possible ways it could be, nor the particular way it should be. Just what it is. There's

Open Secret boasts a nifty plot and, in Coroner Fortin, a fascinating protagonist who will likely be around for a long time. Deryn Collier is a talent to watch.

The members of our secret service have apparently spent so much time under the bed looking for communists that they haven't had the time to look in the bed.

Our focus on the investigation is really wide-ranging. And we can't limit it to just one point in time.

Why do they call it research if I've only done it this one time?

One of the great joys of my job is that you spend a huge amount of time investigating different areas of literature.

We've never finished the investigation of 9/11 and whether the administration actually misused the intel information it had. The evidence seems pretty clear to me. I've seen that for a long time.

One of the most frightening things, I think, is the capacity for retroactive searching, so you can go back in time and trace who someone is in contact with and where they've been.

Some of the priests from the Seminary were in the nunnery every day and night, and often several at a time.

I think this is one of those issues where the deeper you dig, the murkier it gets - and everyone who has spent a lot of time thinking about these issues.

Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

The governor had made up his mind to one thing: Joan was either a witch or a saint, and he meant to find out which it was.

A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar to our ears all the days of our lives—NOBODY TO BLAME.

think you are wrong in saying we ought to follow the methods of Sherlock Holmes. We ought rather to follow Dupin, Poe's detective, the man who preceded Sherlock Holmes.

There is something fascinating about science.  One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Crossword?" he would ask.

In general, writers never find out how strong their talent is: that investigation begins with their obituaries. In the USSR, writers found out how good they were when they were still alive. If the talent was strong, only luck or silence could save them.

What would you rather? yelled Sybil from the distant sandpit. Know everything or know nothing? Know nothing, I yelled back. Then you have the fun of finding everything out.