Quotes

The Renaissance took place in chaos and plague.

~ Shiva Ayyadurai

I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.

~ Albert Camus, The Plague

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That the AIDS pandemic is threatening sustainable development in Africa only reinforces the reality that health is at the center of sustainable development.

~ Gro Harlem Brundtland

One of the greatest diseases is to be nobody to anybody.

~ Mother Teresa

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

~ Voltaire

Literature is a textually transmitted disease, normally contracted in childhood.
~ Jane Yolen

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.

~ Abraham Lincoln

On the dance floor half a dozen couples were throwing themselves around with the reckless abandon of a night watchman with arthritis

Raymond Chandler, Playback

“You had to play the big scene,” he said coldly. “Stand on your rights, talk about the law. How ingenuous can a man get, Marlowe? A man like you who is supposed to know his way around. The law isn’t justice. It’s a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.”

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye

Everything written with vitality expresses that vitality: there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All men who read escape from something else into what lies behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be argued, but its release has become a functional necessity. All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among thinking beings.

Raymond Chandler

The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to.

Raymond Chandler

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

~ Dugald Bell

Even the pandemic flu of 1918 only killed one to two percent of the people who were infected.

~ Anthony Fauci

The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips.

Raymond Chandler, Lady in the Lake

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

attributed to George Bernard Shaw

The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.

~ Raymond Chandler, Lady in the Lake

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.”
    

― Ronald A. Knox

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (17 February 1888 – 24 August 1957) was an English priest who is famous for being the precursor of the Sherlockiana with the publication in 1912 of his article Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.

One of the signs of Napoleon’s greatness is the fact that he once had a publisher shot.

–Siegfried Unseld

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.”

–Robert A. Heinlein

Although I don’t use it nearly so much anymore, I’ve decided, five years down the line, that Mr. Treadstone’s verdict on ‘kind of’ was kind of unjust. Obviously, this phrase can be redundant or reductive, or just plain stupid in some sentences, but not in all sentences. I wouldn’t, for example, use a sentence like ‘Antarctica is kind of cold’, or ‘Hitler was kind of evil’. But sometimes, things aren’t black and white. And sometimes ‘kind of’ expresses this better than any other phrase. For example, when I tell you that my mother was kind of peculiar, I can think of no better way of putting this.
― Gavin Extence

And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before–and thus was the Empire forged.
― Douglas Adams

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

~ Beryl Markham

The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.

~ Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express