Laurie R. King Quotes & Sayings

if she was finished. — 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. — Laurie R. King

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. — Laurie R. King

You think the knife was used, cleaned, then scraped through the blood on the floor?" Lestrade asked. "Evidently." "Why do that?" "Chief Inspector, I try to form my hypotheses upon data, rather than shape the data to match my wishes." And — Laurie R. King

I looked back to see Holmes mincing within my footsteps, his skirt drawn up to reveal the trousers below. Were it not for the threat hanging over us, I would have given out with a girlish giggle at the sight, but I refrained. I passed the gates with the revolver in my hand, but there was no human there, only a scurry in the dustbins. — Laurie R. King

I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Gould's wife when I was researching 'The Moor,' and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor. — Laurie R. King

I undid the wrappings with great curiosity, for Holmes did not normally give gifts. I opened the dark velvet jewller's box and found inside a shiny new set of picklocks, a younger version of his own. Holmes, ever the romantic. Mrs. Hudson would be pleased. — Laurie R. King

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 — Laurie R. King

It is an amazing thing, the difference to one's powers of concentration a pair of comfortable shoes can make. — Laurie R. King

When you're putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits. — Laurie R. King

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? — Laurie R. King

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

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. — Laurie R. King

Would you rather have it outside? Now the heat's broken, coffee in the sun isn't a repulsive idea." "What a romantic offer: something not actively repulsive. — Laurie R. King

I told you it was a backwoods. They probably still practice corn sacrifice. — Laurie R. King

In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors' gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points. — Laurie R. King

You did tell me what a very superior sort of mind your friend has. What a pity he was born trapped in a man's body. — Laurie R. King

Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind. — Laurie R. King

I mean really: If even Conan Doyle hungered to shove Holmes off a tall cliff, surely a young female of obvious intelligence would have brained the detective on first sight. — Laurie R. King

Tell me about yourself, Miss Russel."
I started to give him the obligatory response, first the demurral and then the reluctant flat autobiography, but some slight air of polite inattention in his manner stopped me. Instead, I found myself grinning at him.
"Why don't you tell me about myself, Mr. Holmes? — Laurie R. King

He said nothing. Very sarcastically. — Laurie R. King

I took to the...Library as to a lover... — Laurie R. King

Since people who "discovered" bodies in odd places were often the people who had put them there in the first place. — Laurie R. King

I had given Holmes this wedding as a gift-only to have him turn around and hand it back to me tenfold. And now his two oldest friends in all the world had conspired against our plans, casually rendering our feeble attempts at a gift into solid gold. — Laurie R. King

Holmes," I asked as we stepped into the street, "I realise the question sounds sophomoric, but do you find that there are aspects of yourself with which you feel most comfortable? I only ask out of curiosity; you needn't feel obliged to answer." He offered me his arm and, formally, I took it. "'Who am I?' you mean." He smiled at the question and gave what was at first glance a most oblique answer. "Do you know what a fugue is?" "Are you changing the subject?" "No." I thought in silence for some distance before his answer arranged itself sensibly in my mind. "I see. Two discrete sections of a fugue may not appear related, unless the listener has received the entire work, at which time the music's internal logic makes clear the relationship. — Laurie R. King

Holmes, you're a genius.
So I have been told. — Laurie R. King

Eccentricty had flowered into madness. — Laurie R. King

When there is an emotional element in a belief, argument rarely has much effect. — Laurie R. King

My God...it can think. — Laurie R. King

Scones (flavoured with outrage, optional - see "My Story") Mix together: 2 cups flour 4 t. baking powder ¾ t. salt 2-4 T. sugar (depending on whether scones are to be sweet or savoury) Cut into the flour mixture: 1/3 cup butter When the mixture looks like coarse breadcrumbs, add any flavourings (handful of grated cheese with herbs, and green onions; lemon rind; dried cranberries, currents, or blueberries, etc). Beat together: ¾ cup milk or cream 1 egg Stir into the dry mixture. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead three or four times, then roll out to ¾ inch thick and cut into circles with cutter, or pat into one large circle and cut that into wedges. Bake at 400 degrees 15 minutes, or until golden. Can brush the top with egg and sprinkle with coarse sugar before baking, if desired. Some — Laurie R. King

I took to the Bodleian library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms to emerge, blinking and dazed with the small and feel of all those books. — Laurie R. King

Stop it!'
He relented, so far as he could, stepping forward to take my head into his hands. 'Russell, once, only once, I was taken and suffered for it. Please, my dear wife, believe me, this is not the same situation ... ' ... I turned back to Holmes and hissed, 'If you're wrong, I shall be extremely angry with you.' Then O kissed him hard on the lips, more threat than affection, and let him step back into his cell ... 'However, Russ? I think that, all in all, given the choice, I prefer you with the hair and without the moustache. — Laurie R. King

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. — Laurie R. King

Love was the thing that kept a person going past exhaustion, beyond reason, after hope was at its end. Grit, — Laurie R. King

You see why I married her, Mycroft? The exquisite juxtaposition of ladylike threads and backhanded compliments proved irresistible. — Laurie R. King

The matches also came into focus: a cheap, bright label, in French. I picked up the box, slid it open, my nose stung by the smell of sulphur. Four matches. I took one, scraped it into life, held it to the oil lamp. A spot of warmth entered the room. — Laurie R. King

Everyone is allowed a weakness, even women of the twentieth century. — Laurie R. King

...and opened his mouth to speak in that precise drawl which is the trademark of the overly educated upper class english gentleman. A high voice: A biting one: definitely an eccentric. — Laurie R. King

Moments of pure relaxation were rare for me. There was always the nagging of books unread, work undone, time a-wasting. — Laurie R. King

I am watching bees. — Laurie R. King

I am getting old, Russell. Gone are the days when I could scramble about on the moors all day and curl up happily at night with a thin blanket and a stone for a pillow. Three nights on floorboards and one night without sleep following three days at strenuous labour make me aware that I am no longer a callow youth. — Laurie R. King

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses.
But there's nothing like a book. — Laurie R. King

I crawled into my books and pulled the pages up over my head.
(A Monstrous Regiment of Women) — Laurie R. King

Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steam-roller of deadlines and details straight at one's daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage. — Laurie R. King

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. — Laurie R. King

He was a talkative man and jabbered away the whole time as his horse meandered about the road. It saved us from having to construct a story for him, though by the time he left us in Banbury, I was most weary of smiling stupidly out from under my hat brim and trying not to squint. As his wagon pulled away, I turned to Holmes. Next time we do this, I will play the deaf old woman and you can laugh at rude jests for an hour. — Laurie R. King

What does it mean, to lose one's mind? Where does it go? If a man is out of his mind, where is he? What is insane when the world is mad by contrast? — Laurie R. King

Normally, one is only conscious of the room around one, but when no-one else is present, one's awareness is free to fill all the space. — Laurie R. King

Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love. — Laurie R. King

The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life. — Laurie R. King

You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing. — Laurie R. King

Pray tell, she said, although her voice told him not to.
He ignored her tone, let out a thoughtful cloud of smoke, and said, ... — Laurie R. King

But somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre. — Laurie R. King

The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era. — Laurie R. King

The night air moved up towards the Downs, washing over sea and orchard. I breathed it in, and thought that henceforth, loneliness would smell to me like fermenting apples. — Laurie R. King

The house was still, weighty with the comfort of a thousand books. — Laurie R. King

Suddenly, it occurred to me that my feelings towards the little man were distinctly maternal. Good God, I thought, how utterly revolting, and I turned my mind firmly to the problem at hand. — Laurie R. King

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head ... — Laurie R. King

The problem in turning independent thinkers loose on a matter is, they tend to go beyond the theoretical and seize the chance for independent action. Thus, — Laurie R. King

I felt instantly at home, and wanted only to dismiss Alistair, along with the rest of Justice Hall, that I might have a closer look at the shelves.I had to content myself instead with a strolling perusal, my hands locked behind my back to keep them from reaching out for Le Morte D'Arthur, Caxton 1485 or the delicious little red-and-gilt Bestiary, MS Circa 1250 or ... If I took one down, I should be lost. So I looked, like a hungry child in a sweet shop, and trailed out on my guide's heels with one longing backward glance. — Laurie R. King

Were she not aware that he was more than a man who could make plants grow. And — Laurie R. King

THE END OF a case is always long, tedious, and anticlimactic, — Laurie R. King

I was merely going to say that I hope you realise that guilt is a poor foundation for a life, without other motivations beside it. — Laurie R. King

The lust for murder is not a rational thing. In queens, it is an instinctual response. — Laurie R. King

I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine. — Laurie R. King

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. — Laurie R. King

Most damning of phrases: He meant well. — Laurie R. King

It was hypnotic, and then it was unsettling, and finally I became aware of another entity in my universe, sitting on the shore two hundred yards away, smoking a pipe ... — Laurie R. King

Do not neglect to bring your revolver, Russell. It may be needed, and it does us no good in your drawer with that disgusting cheese."
"My lovely Stilton; it's almost ripe, too. I do hope Mr. Thomas enjoys it."
"Any riper and it will eat through the woodwork and drop into the room below."
"You envy me my educated tastes."
"That I will not honour with a response. Get out the door, Russell. — Laurie R. King

-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? — Laurie R. King

Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions. — Laurie R. King

The last dog I had was an Irish wolfhound - now that is a dog. Rather spoils a person for a lesser canine, that is, anything under a hundredweight. — Laurie R. King

Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery. — Laurie R. King

Ma'alesh; no matter; never mind; what can you do but accept things as they are? Ma'alesh, your pot overturned in the fire; ma'alesh, your prize mare died; ma'alesh, you lost all your possessions and half your family. The word was the everyday essence of Islam - which itself, after all, means submission. — Laurie R. King

When the choice came down to tears, strong drink, or potatoes, one chooses potatoes. She — Laurie R. King

Why the devil was my husband positively grinning - and with what looked remarkably like relief? — Laurie R. King

When we arrived at his cottage we had known each other forever. — Laurie R. King

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

Pride is a sweetmeat, to be savoured in small pieces; it makes for a poor feast. — Laurie R. King

I have been very interested in the number of kids who have read the Sherlock Holmes books after reading the Mary Russell books. That's great. That's more or less how I rediscovered the Holmes books. — Laurie R. King

I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there's no knowing what one mightn't do. — Laurie R. King

But a topee is not a turban, and I had been my teacher's pupil before I became my husband's wife, learning to my bones that half a disguise is none at all ... The moment my short-cropped, pomade-sleek, unquestionably masculine hair passed beneath his nose was the closest thing I've ever seen Holmes to fainting dead away. — Laurie R. King

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

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 ... — Laurie R. King

The past is but the beginning of a beginning. - H. G. Wells, The Discovery of the Future — Laurie R. King

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915. — Laurie R. King

My God, it can recognise another human being when it's hit over the head with one. — Laurie R. King

One must never disregard a message from the universe. — Laurie R. King

Men do, I've found, accept the most errant nonsense from a well dressed woman — Laurie R. King

Libraries made me - as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being. — Laurie R. King

I dislike the idea of a murderer employing children,' said Holmes darkly. 'It is, I agree, bad for their morals, and interferes with their sleep.' 'And their schooling,' added Holmes sententiously. — Laurie R. King

Don't stride so, Russell!" Holmes whispered fiercely. "Throw your boots out in front of you as you walk and let your elbows stick out a bit. It would help if you let your mouth hang open stupidly, and for God's sake take off your glasses, at least until we get out of town. I won't allow you to walk into anything. Do you think you could persuade your nose to drip a bit, just for the effect? — Laurie R. King

The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets call the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images. — Laurie R. King

Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice. — Laurie R. King

I would have stolen it for you, had I known you were interested." His voice was muffled by the door to the lumber room down the hallway, and I heard thumps and a crash.
I raised my voice a trifle more than mere volume required. "I'm interested because she was. Both of them, come to that
Damian's art is infused with mystic symbols and traditions."
Holmes' voice answered two inches away from my ear, making me jerk and spray a handful of maps across the floor. "Religion can be a dangerous thing, it is true," he remarked darkly, and went out again. — Laurie R. King

Holmes, I'm a 24 year old prude. — Laurie R. King