Top 100 Stout's Quotes
#1. Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.
P.G. Wodehouse
#2. The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a team generally regarded as seeking justice, can be compared to the adventures of Rex Stout's two most famous characters, Nero Wolf and Archie Goodwin.
James Grady
#3. A Dickens character to me is a theatrical projection of a character. Not that it isn't real. It's real, but in that removed sense. But Sherlock Holmes is simply there. I would be astonished if I went to 221 1/2 B Baker Street and didn't find him.
[An Invitation to Learning, January 1942]
Rex Stout
#4. Who doubting tyranny, and fainting under Fortune's false lottery, desperately run To death, for dread of death; that soul's most stout, That, bearing all mischance, dares last it out.
Francis Beaumont
#5. Yeah. I'm the fly in the soup. I don't like it any better than you do. Flies don't like being swamped in soup, especially when it's hot.
Rex Stout
#6. I basically have the diet of a 19th-century Irish navy, apart from the litre of stout a day. It's meat and potatoes and bread and cheese: those are my four food groups.
Daniel Radcliffe
#7. It's too bad we're not all teddy bears. More stuffing would only make us cuter and cuddlier.
Richelle E. Goodrich
#8. You can't dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art's sake, but it can't be cheerful.
Rex Stout
#9. Far better it is to have a stout heart always and suffer one's share of evils, than to be ever fearing what may happen.
Herodotus
#10. What do I believe in? Belief means faith, and there's only one damned thing in the world I have any faith in. That's the idea of American democracy, because it seems to me so obvious that that's the only sensible way to run human affairs.
Rex Stout
#11. The duty of labor is written on a man's body: in the stout muscle of the arm,, and the delicate machinery of the hand.
Theodore Parker
#12. Old is the tree and the fruit good,
Very old and thick the wood.
Woodman, is your courage stout?
Beware! the root is wrapped about
Your mother's heart, your father's bones;
And like the mandrake comes with groans.
Robert Louis Stevenson
#13. I don't know if I would personally want to step in the cage and either have my face caved in or cave in somebody else's, but I've met some really beautiful and sensitive and morally pretty stout individuals who happen to be fighters. It's really awesome.
Matt Lauria
#14. Any man who undertakes to write a play is either a damned fool or a hero, I don't know which. When you write a book, you pull it out of the typewriter and that's that. When you write a play you've got to go on with the producer and the director and the actors and the rehearsals and the ...
Rex Stout
#15. There's nothing as safe as ignorance or as dangerous.
Rex Stout
#16. When we turned right on Thirty-fifth Street our suffix came along. By the time we rolled to the curb in front of Wolfe's house there wasn't even hyphen between us.
Rex Stout
#17. Of course the modern detective story puts off its best tricks till the last, but Doyle always put his best tricks first and that's why they're still the best ones.
Rex Stout
#18. Sometimes it's things that take the joy out of life, like a blowout when you're hitting sixty or a button coming off of a shirt when you're in a hurry, but usually it's people.
Rex Stout
#19. I saw a werewolf drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's. His hair was perfect.
Martha Stout
#20. Wolfe grunted. "That's admirably specious, but drop it. I give you my word that I haven't the faintest notion of who killed Ellen Tenzer." Cramer eyed him. "Your word?" "Yes, sir.
Rex Stout
#21. It's a fair-sized job to write a book that people can be bothered just to read; when they begin to steal copies, you are really getting some place.
Ruth Stout
#22. Ryan Stout, a straight-arrow-looking kind of guy, shocks the crowd into laughter with his inventive interplay between innocence and a jarringly twisted point of view. He goes from loony to weirdly logical. With him, it's more than clever writing; his comedy is based on clear and clever thinking.
Ben Fong-Torres
#23. This is a wonderful world for women. The richness, the hope, the promise of life today, particularly for women, are exciting beyond belief. Nonetheless, we need stout hearts and strong characters; we need knowledge and training; we need organized effort to meet the future.
Belle S. Spafford
#24. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef's ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish.
Rex Stout
#25. My mother was a stout woman with a man's name - Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes - no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin.
Charles M. Blow
#26. He's sick." "What with?" "Sitzenlust. Chronic. The opposite of wanderlust.
Rex Stout
#27. Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.
Martha Stout
#28. It is indubitable that Carol Mardus was the mother of the baby left in Mrs. Valdon's vestibule and that she was gravely disquieted to learn that I knew it and could demonstrate it.
Rex Stout
#29. She's capable of anything, and she's as deft as a bear's tongue.
Rex Stout
#30. A Grape-Nuts ad dealt with warfare, but of the schoolyard variety, extolling the cereal's value in helping children prevail in fistfights: Husky bodies and stout nerves depend - more often than we think - on the food eaten.
Erik Larson
#31. Is this Nero Wolfe's house?" The voice got me one-half awake. "Yes. Archie Goodwin." "This is Sarah Jaffee. I'm awfully sorry, Mr. Goodwin, did I wake you up?" "Not quite. Go ahead and finish it.
Rex Stout
#32. Each one
From one's little noose
Cranes out
Yells and shouts
Groans aloud
And grows stout
And the noose tightens
Leaving no way to creap out
Till at the end
Swollen
Spent out
Becomes silent.
I am also having my turn among all.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#33. That's ill-advised. More, it's puerile.
Rex Stout
#34. I can type with me toes
Suck stout through me nose
And where it's gonna end
God only knows
Shane MacGowan
#35. To read of a detective's daring finesse or ingenious stratagem is a rare joy.
Rex Stout
#36. When people's brains stop working, just go somewhere else. (Death of a Doxie)
Rex Stout
#37. I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is a hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity.
Rex Stout
#38. The young woman went to rummage in a sideboard and came back to the table with a stout cook's knife. But instead of using it to cut the fruit, she showed the point to each of the men in a meaningful way, then tucked the blade into her kirtle. They
George R R Martin
#39. Though I suppose you've changed your mind, now that there's a woman sleeping in your bed - " "Nonsense. My bed - " "You own all the beds in this house except mine, don't you? Certainly it's your bed.
Rex Stout
#40. To say that man is a reasoning animal is a very different thing than to say that most of man's decisions are based on his rational process. That I don't believe at all.
Rex Stout
#41. I gathered that with the men the consensus was that women were okay in their place, which I guess was the way cavemen felt about it, and all their male descendants. The question was, and still is, what's their place?
Rex Stout
#42. Courtesy is one's own affair, but decency is a debt to life
Rex Stout
#43. That's one of the disadvantages of being poor, you don't dare kill anybody.
Rex Stout
#45. Marlinspike goes down to the kitchen, to grow stout and live out his beastly nature. There is a summer ahead, though he cannot imagine its pleasures; sometimes when he's walking in the garden he sees him, a half-grown cat, lolling watchful in an apple tree, or snoring on a wall in the sun.
Hilary Mantel
#46. Na, she's righted again," said a cool young fisherman, "and they've gotten down that unchancy mast. They maun have stout hearts and skeely hands that work her; but it's for life, and that learns folk baith pith and lear. There! - but it's owre now.
Mrs. Oliphant
#47. Mrs. Jaffee a little earlier. I asked if he was escorting Mrs. Jaffee. "Certainly," he said virtuously. "She is my client. What's that noise you're making?" "It's something special," I told him, "and takes a lot of practice. Don't try it offhand. It's a derisive chortle.
Rex Stout
#48. My chance, when it came, was due, literally, to the fact that I was slender ... You cannot make an opera audience believe that a man will endanger his soul, and commit robbery and murder for a very stout lady's sake.
Maria Jeritza
#49. She has regular features but yet one could not say that she was pretty. She is too big and too stout. Her features are not regular and yet one could say that she is very pretty. She is too small and too thin. She's a voice teacher
Eugene Ionesco
#50. No man with any sense assumes that a woman's words mean to her exactly what they mean to him.
Rex Stout
#51. Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious effort to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.
Nero Wolf in Death of a Dude.
Rex Stout
#52. What grace is meant to do is to help good people, not to escape their sufferings, but to bear them with a stout heart, with a fortitude that finds its strength in faith.
Augustine Of Hippo
#53. One trouble with living beyond your deserved number of years is that there's always some reason to live another year. And I'd like to live another year so that Nixon won't be President. If he's re-elected I'll have to live another four years.
Rex Stout
#54. But you comfort me, Gimli, I'm glad to have you standing nigh with your stout legs and your hard axe. I wish there were more of your kin among us. But even more would I give for a hundred good archers of Mirkwood.
- Legolas
J.R.R. Tolkien
#55. That's it! said Jo to herself, when she at length discovered that genuine good will toward one's fellow men could beautify and dignify even a stout German teacher, who shoveled in his dinner, darned his own socks, and was burdened with the name of Bhaer.
Louisa May Alcott
#56. At first sin was as fragile as a spiders thread, and finally as stout as a ship's hawser; sin arrived as a passerby, next lingered for a moment, then came as a visitor, and finally became master of the house.
Israel Shenker
#57. I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it.
Rex Stout
#58. Of course, a hole in the ice offers peril only to those who go skating.
Rex Stout
#59. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?
Rex Stout
#60. I've been used to consider poetry as the food of love " Mr.Darcy
Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away." Eliza
Jane Austen
#61. Fritz giggled. He's the only man I've ever known who could giggle without giving you doubts about his fundamentals.
Rex Stout
#62. As for the boys ... vulnerable fathers turn to time-honored defensive responses to maintain the function that father knows best' Parents, especially fathers, teach their sons to obey authority no matter what.
Martha Stout
#63. Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.
George Orwell
#64. Perry, the manager, had come up with him, in trousers and bathrobe. He was a stout, jovial-looking man ordinarily, but right now he was only stout.
("The Room With Something Wrong")
Cornell Woolrich
#65. I'm not hysterical." "Of course you are. All women are. Their moments of calm are merely recuperative periods between outbursts. I
Rex Stout
#66. Invade a man's privacy and then put the burden on him.
Rex Stout
#67. Wolfe scowled at her. I could see he was torn with conflicting emotions. A female in his kitchen was an outrage. A woman criticizing his or Fritz's cooking was an insult. But corned beef hash was one of life's toughest problems, never yet solved by anyone.
Rex Stout
#69. The central paradox and challenge of marriage is that we have to make family out of someone we're not related to ...
Ruth Stout
#70. There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.
Rex Stout
#71. The minute those two little particles inside a woman's womb have joined together, billions of decisions have been made. A thing like that has to come from entropy.
Rex Stout
#72. To pronounce French properly you must have within you a deep antipathy, not to say scorn, for some of the most sacred of the Anglo-Saxon prejudices.
Rex Stout
#73. I understand the technique of eccentricity; it would be futile for a man to labor at establishing a reputation for oddity if he were ready at the slightest provocation to revert to normal action.
Rex Stout
#74. After I went to bed I had a curious fancy as to dreams. In sleep the doors of the mind are shut, and thoughts come jumping in at the windows. They tumble headlong, and therefore are so disorderly and strange. Sometimes they are stout and light on their feet, and then they are rational dreams.
James Boswell
#75. James Joyce once called Guinness stout "the wine of Ireland." Indeed it's one of the most successful beers worldwide. Ten million glasses of this ambrosial liquid are consumed with great gusto each day.
Rashers Tierney
#76. The porch light came on and Aunt B swung the door open. Middle-aged and stout, with graying hair rolled into a bun, she looked like she should be baking cookies, not ruling a brood of social deviants with a penchant for hysterical laughter and kinky sex.
Ilona Andrews
#77. Every Sherlock Holmes story has at least one marvelous scene.
Rex Stout
#78. Isabel frowned. "Alma Trumbo, you did not just dig up a human bone from our flowerbed. It's got to be a dinosaur bone, dinky or not."
"A dinosaur bone, eh?" The short, stout Alma gave her tall, slim sister the old up and down. "What then, are we the Flintstones living in Bedrock?
Ed Lynskey
#79. He drinks his stout and laughs that there's nothing like a great bloody steak of a Friday night and if that's the worst sin he ever commits he'll float to heaven body and soul, ha ha ha.
Frank McCourt
#80. All my important decisions are made for me by my subconscious. My frontal lobes are just kidding themselves that they decide anything at all. All they do is think up reasons for the decisions that are already made.
Rex Stout
#81. Sure as the most certain sure, plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams,
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical,
I and this mystery here we stand.
Walt Whitman
#82. But when you're there, there you are, and
Rex Stout
#83. If you have the soul of a gardener, not for anything would you work with gloves on.
Ruth Stout
#84. The world continues to offer glittering prizes to those who have stout hearts and sharp swords.
F. E. Smith
#85. There is peace in the garden. Peace and results.
Ruth Stout
#86. The grass as bristly and stout as chives and me wondering when the ground will break and me wondering how anything fragile survives
Anne Sexton
#87. Sent as a present from Annam
A red cockatoo.
Coloured like the peach-tree blossom,
Speaking with the speech of men.
And they did to it what is always done
To the learned and eloquent.
They took a cage with stout bars
And shut it up inside.
Bai Juyi
#88. Friends, in my experience, are like ladies' fashions. They come and go with the seasons, and are rarely of such stout stuff as bears repeated wearing.
Francine Mathews
#89. Yes, I said something to him, and then I cooled him off." "Cooled? By what process?" "I knocked him halfway across Broadway and took my wife." "You did?" Wolfe scowled at him. "What's the matter with your brain? Does it leak?
Rex Stout
#90. Genius is fine for the ignition spark, but to get there someone has to see that the radiator doesn't leak and no tire is flat.
Rex Stout
#91. Frankly, I wish I could make my heart quit doing an extra thump when Wolfe says satisfactory, Archie. It's childish.
Rex Stout
#92. Only fools and philosophers waste time on the unknowable.
Rex Stout
#93. If courage is acting according to one's conscience despite pain or fear, then strength is the ability to keep conscience awake and in force despite the demands of authorities to do otherwise.
Martha Stout
#94. Be bold: Venus herself aids the stout-hearted.
Tibullus
#95. Okay, Dolly Brooke killed her because she was going to marry a quote nigger unquote, and how do we prove it?'
He frowned. 'I have told you not to use that word in my hearing.'
'I was merely quoting. It isn't - '
'Shut up. I mean the word 'unquote' and you know it.
Rex Stout
#96. Everything from war to picnics depends on the weather, as Wolfe remarked
Rex Stout
#97. I decided that the only way to keep feminine intuition from sneaking through an occasional lucky stab was to stay away from women altogether, which wasn't practical.
Rex Stout
#98. War doesn't mature men; it merely pickles them in the brine of disgust and dread.
Rex Stout
#99. Never give up! If adversity presses, Providence wisely has mingled the cup, And the best counsel, in all your distresses, Is the stout watchword of "Never give up."
Martin Farquhar Tupper
#100. No man should tell a lie unless he is shrewd enough to recognize the time for renouncing it, if and when it comes, and knows how to renounce it gracefully.
Rex Stout
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
