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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #myster
In almost every thriller, a point is reached when someone, usually calling from a phone booth, telephones with a vital piece of information, which he cannot divulge by phone. By the time the hero arrives at the place where they had arranged to meet, the caller is dead, or too near death to tell. There is never an explanation for the reluctance of the caller to impart his message in the first place. Certainly, the convention existed well before the age of the tape recorder and the wiretap. Not on the phone, in a spy or mystery story, has always been, in and of itself, sufficient to hold up the resolution of the case for a long, long time. ↗
#age
(The Mona Lisa), that really is the ugliest portrait I’ve seen, the only thing that supposedly makes it famous is the mystery behind it,” Katherine admitted as she remembered her trips to the Louvre and how she shook her head at the poor tourists crowding around to see a jaundiced, eyebrow-less lady that reminded her of tight-lipped Washington on the dollar bill. Surely, they could have chosen a better portrait of the First President for their currency? ↗
I'm sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes. 'The modern girl has a thoroughly businesslike attitude to life' That sort of thing. It's not a bit true! Some girls are businesslike and some aren't. Some men are sentimental and muddle-headed, others are clear-headed and logical. There are just different types of brains. ↗
I prayed to a mystery. Sometimes I was simply aware of the mystery. I saw a flash of it during a trip to New York that David and I took before we were married. We were walking on a busy sidewalk in Manhattan. I don't remember if it was day or night. A man with a wound on his forehead came toward us. His damp, ragged hair might have been clotted with blood, or maybe it was only dirt. He wore deeply dirty clothes. His red, swollen hands, cupped in half-fists, swung loosely at his sides. His eyes were focused somewhere past my right shoulder. He staggered while he walked. The sidewalk traffic flowed around him and with him. He was strange and frightening, and at the same time he belonged on the Manhattan sidewalk as much as any of us. It was that paradox -- that he could be both alien and resident, both brutalized and human, that he could stand out in the moving mass of people like a sea monster in a school of tuna and at the same time be as much at home as any of us -- that stayed with me. I never saw him again, but I remember him often, and when I do, I am aware of the mystery. Years later, I was out on our property on the Olympic Peninsula, cutting a path through the woods. This was before our house was built. After chopping through dense salal and hacking off ironwood bushes for an hour or so, I stopped, exhausted. I found myself standing motionless, intensely aware of all of the life around me, the breathing moss, the chattering birds, the living earth. I was as much a part of the woods as any millipede or cedar tree. At that moment, too, I was aware of the mystery. Sometimes I wanted to speak to this mystery directly. Out of habit, I began with "Dear God" and ended with "Amen". But I thought to myself, I'm not praying to that old man in the sky. Rather, I'm praying to this thing I can't define. It was sort of like talking into a foggy valley. Praying into a bank of fog requires alot of effort. I wanted an image to focus on when I prayed. I wanted something to pray *to*. but I couldn't go back to that old man. He was too closely associated with all I'd left behind. ↗
A selection of quotes from The Night of Harrison Monk’s Death (Jane Hetherington's Adventures in Detection: 1) "Is this one of the more unusual cases of safe-breaking you've been asked to investigate, Mrs Hetherington?" "Remember your private detective wants to be able to sleep soundly at night and in their own bed, not one supplied as her Majesty's pleasure." "It seems to be an open and shut case doesn't it? But it's not you know? How do you know if anything is what it seems?" "But where is Cheung kin?" "When I first set eyes on your father, he was spying on a man from between two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica." "I don't think I need say more." "On the contrary, if you want me to have any idea what you're talking about, I think you do." "Why don't you report it to the police?" "Because I stole it in the first place didn't I?" "It's something of a mystery, I admit." "Vanished into thin air!" "You sound so sensible Mrs Hetherington. Please help us get to the bottom of this." Ah, thought Jane – the old story. "No body was found?" "Shall I put the kettle on?" "Only if you fill it with whiskey." "The course of true love didn't run smoothly for me either, you know." "Life has its tragedies for sure." "… What do I want? I want money that's what I want. I want money." She was even more horrified by the words she heard next. Callum MacCallum knew what it was like to be an outsider. ↗
#crime #female-private-detective #mystery #suspense #whodunnit
