Detective Mystery Quotes

#1. That was the thing about luck, its laws were those of scarcity.

Lily Gardner

#2. Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge.

B.V. Lawson

#3. Digital Age Cozy: Cozy mystery can be more than knitting grannies, cats, and cookbooks!

A.E.H. Veenman

#4. Norm was lean, his short, straight black hair parted on the side, his mustache trimmed like he'd never heard of Adolf Hitler.

Jane Sunday

#5. Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign.

B.V. Lawson

#6. P.I. Cassie Cruise--You don't have to like her, but you damn well better respect her

S.L. Ellis

#7. One cannot think well, love well, or sleep well, if one has not dined well.

Linda Weaver Clarke

#8. Don't wanna ever take your shoes off in coconut land. Never know when you're gonna have to run.

Dianne Harman

#9. That's just where I must part company with you, Inspector," said the Vicar with a gentle smile. "I'm rather a voracious reader of mystery stories, and it's always struck me that the detective in fiction is inclined to underrate the value of intuition.

John Bude

#10. Florence Dempsey, played by Torchy Blane actress Glenda Farrell, goes so far as to memorably declare to her friend Charlotte in The Mystery of the Wax Museum, "You raise the kids; I'll raise the roof!

Erika Janik

#11. You look at me as if I were a conjuror,' Holmes remarked, with a laugh.

Anthony Horowitz

#12. Time is a terrible thing because it can erase both joys and pains.

Gosho Aoyama

#13. Every mystery novel I ever read, the great detective was such an arrogant fuck you could replace 70% of his dialogue with 'Are you stupid?' and the conversation would still make sense.

NisiOisiN

#14. I was between them, and as the tension sparked, I felt like a small rodent trapped between mastodons.

Phillipa Bornikova

#15. Suddenly the images in the center of the room became more than images. They solidified.

Stephanie Osborn

#16. Some day I would like to write a textbook on how to be a female detective in a man's world. Rule Number One: try not to let your animosity show. Your career as an investigator will be short lived if you cannot hide your feelings when you dislike, distrust, or despise your interviewee.

Frances Brody

#17. A bit unsporting, what?" he said. "Ought to ferret out the mystery before we go. Whole thing's like a detective story. Positively thrilling.

Anonymous

#18. Dreema and you disagree. She cottons to Richmond, but you can't be weaned off Pelham. So I offer you a fair middle ground: relocate to northern Virginia. She transfers to the state morgue on Braddock Road, and you get to stay near your old beat.

Ed Lynskey

#19. Like a detective keenly searching for clues, our daughters are solving the mystery of womanhood itself.

Melia Keeton-Digby

#20. Rene Caron takes my breath away!

Teresa Lynn

#21. I am the prosecutor. I represent the state. I am here to present to you the evidence of a crime. Together you will weigh this evidence. You will deliberate upon it. You will decide if it proves the defendant's guilt.

Scott Turow

#22. There were men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, men who try. They may not look young, but they still look viable. Lammers wasn't one of those. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.

Lily Gardner

#23. Simon's brain tried to comprehend the situation. 'Was an international supermodel really holding Doc Gutson, leader of the infamous Bloodworth Gang, captive?

Clare Havens

#24. About Tommy, you went through your whole life craving these little pockets of time and missing them for more time than you had them.

Lily Gardner

#25. Ah ha!' the Doc screeched suddenly, wheeling around. 'The salicylic acid! Maybe it SHOULD have been heated first!

Clare Havens

#26. Watson fully comprehended the fact that occasionally it is useful for one's adversaries to underestimate one's abilities."
~Sherlock Holmes

Stephanie Osborn

#27. He wore his personality like a suit that was too tight.

B.V. Lawson

#28. I've recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It's a mystery stripped of all but the essential facts. Take this one, for instance: As

Alan Bradley

#29. The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.

G.K. Chesterton

#30. It takes a certain kind of man willing to work long, grueling hours in a career offering few rewards.

Jon Michaelsen

#31. She and I are as far apart as the stars in the sky and the soles of my feet." Detective Sean Ryan ~Deception on Sable Hill by Shelley Gray

Shelley Gray

#32. Marshall Jevons is the pioneer for integrating economics and detective fiction, and The Mystery of the Invisible Hand is another fine effort in this genre.

Tyler Cowen

#33. A detective with his murder mystery, a chemist seeking the structure of a new compound, use little of the formal and logical modes of reasoning. Through a series of intuitions, surmises, fancies, they stumble upon the right explanation, and have a knack of seizing it when it once comes within reach.

Gilbert N. Lewis

#34. 'True Detective' is a densely layered work with resonant details and symbology and rich characterization under the guise of one of the forms of this mystery genre. That's what we shoot for.

Nic Pizzolatto

#35. Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.

Rex Stout

#36. If everything comes in your way just the way you wanted them to ,then you're probably in the wrong lane.

ARKOPAUL

#37. Just the night before, a puma's howl had set a chill at my spine and, man, life didn't get any richer than that.

Ed Lynskey

#38. History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.

David Grann

#39. The Land of Civilian was a dry bitter place where you sat in your car staring at drawn curtains and closed doors for hours on end, and where everything was a big, freaking secret.

Lily Gardner

#40. It was quite elementary,' returned the detective with a languid gesture of one hand.

Anthony Horowitz

#41. When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.

James Crumley

#42. Ever since we'd found Wilson, his cousin's calmness bothered me. I realized now I felt less unease with angry outbursts from grieving relatives, than I had with the slow, ticking time bomb of the quiet and collected.
--Prepped for Kill, Marjorie Gardens Mystery Book 2

A.E.H. Veenman

#43. In near panic, I craned my neck to gaze over the cabin's roofline a bursting fireball.

Ed Lynskey

#44. A wise man does not always admit to everything he knows. And sometimes an overly-credulous friend can be a source of mild amusement."
~Sherlock Holmes

Stephanie Osborn

#45. Flowers are fragile and ephemeral ... Even if you meant to protect them with a surrounding fence from wind and rain, they would die without sunlight ... and a spindly fence has no power against a strong wind. - Haibara Ai

Gosho Aoyama

#46. Love interest nearly always weakens a mystery because it introduces a type of suspense that is antagonistic to the detective's struggle to solve a problem.

Raymond Chandler

#47. Covert operations relied on the unguarded slip, the unconscious choosing of one word over another.

Sara Sheridan

#48. New York as a character in a mystery would not be the detective, would not be the murderer. It would be the enigmatic suspect who knows the real story but isn't going to tell it. - DONALD E. WESTLAKE

Thomas Pynchon

#49. "One cannot be a mother without first being a person; family, husband, and children should not be allowed, as is so often the case, to steal a woman's selfhood and her dreams."
Mother to Sherlock, Mycroft, and Enola Holmes by author Nancy Springer

Vannessa Anderson

#50. One key to the distinction between mystery and suspense writing involves the relative positions of hero and reader. In the ideal mystery novel, the readers is two steps behind the detective ... The ideal suspense reader, on the other hand, is two steps ahead of the hero.

Carolyn Wheat

#51. It would do her good to have some demons to fight, to be swung out in space and held over some bottomless pit now and then.

Josephine Tey

#52. Rick had said the perfect honeymoon was being together.

Linda Weaver Clarke

#53. All the clues are there in front of us,hidden under a veil,we cannot get the clue by searching for,we have to search for the veil instead.

Arkopaul Das

#54. It was really in the Golden Age, between the two world wars, when the pure detective story - of which the locked room mystery is really the ultimate form - became popular.

Otto Penzler

#55. We all have something special in us, it's a matter of finding it, and knowing what to do with it.

Robert Magarian

#56. From Chapter 1:
The main rub was the lack of RnR and I burned out. Three years and three stripes later, I ejected from the MP Corps, vowing I'd never do police or criminal investigative work again. Instead, I returned home when I should've learned better.

Ed Lynskey

#57. In a single lifetime, roughly from 1865 to 1930, one finds the pioneering and patterning works of modern fantasy, science fiction, children's literature and detective fiction, of modern adventure, mystery and romance.

Michael Dirda

#58. If you don't like the path your life has taken, choose another.

Robert G. DeMers