“I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.”

“Never close your lips to those whom you have already opened your heart.”

“What is he to learn? To imitate? Or to avoid? When your friends the bees worry themselves about their sovereign, and become perfectly distracted touching the slightest monarchical movement, are we ...”

“What greater gift than the love of a cat.”

“...I do come home at Christmas. We all do, or we all should. We all come home, or ought to come home, for a short holiday - the longer, the better - from the great boarding-school, where we are for...”

“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You have been in every line I have ever read, since I first came here, the rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then....”

“Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great fami...”

“It is a pity he did not write in pencil. As you have no doubt frequently observed, the impression usually goes through -- a fact which has dissolved many a happy marriage.”

“It seems that the Parisian Oulipo group has recently constructed a matrix of all possible murder-story situations and has found that there is still to be written a book in which the murderer is the...”

“We ran both the courier service and a detective agency from the same office, and had phone apps for both. Basically, we're Uber for parcels and mysteries.”

“We would never call inexplicable little insights 'hunches,' for fear of drawing the universe's attention. But they happened, and you knew you had been in the proximity of one that had come through ...”

“What is needed is the imagination of the poet and the reasoning power of the mathematician. The thief of "The Purloined Letter" successfully hides the letter from the police because he is both a po...”

“Ma was heavy, but not fat; thick with child-bearing and work. She wore a loose Mother Hubbard of gray cloth in which there had once been colored flowers, but the color was washed out now, so that t...”

“As Romeo and Juliet found to their cost, marriage is never just about two people falling in love, it is about families.”

“Families share relationships based not only blood, but also the unique affiliation of a terribly long cord when measured in comparison with any other undertaking in a persons life, from cradle to t...”