It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.

the detective's highest talent lay in the gentle art of seeking favours under the guise of conferring them!

One of us in this very room is in fact the murderer.

Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

It had come about ex­act­ly in the way things hap­pened in books.

If anyone is really determined to lend you a book, you never can get out of it!

I have often had occasion to notice how, where a direct question would fail to elicit a response, a false assumption brings instant information in the form of a contradiction.