Laurie R. King Quotations

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.

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.

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.

Whenever I go to England, I'm on pilgrimage. I walk the countryside around Eastbourne because that's where Sherlock Holmes retired.

Blogs are the main exception I make in my aversion to complex machinery.

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.

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.

Eccentricty had flowered into madness.

Libraries made me - as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being.

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

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.

Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

. . . 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. . .

Men do, I've found, accept the most errant nonsense from a well dressed woman

Holmes, I'm a 24 year old prude.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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

I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Goulds wife when I was researching The Moor, and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My God...it can think.

Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.

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.

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...

Why the devil was my husband positively grinning - and with what looked remarkably like relief?

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.

...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind.

Most damning of phrases: He meant well.

I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head...

It is an amazing thing, the difference to one’s powers of concentration a pair of comfortable shoes can make.