The ways of fate are indeed hard to understand. If there is not some compensation hereafter, then the world is a cruel jest.

It is a mistake to confound strangeness with mystery. The most commonplace crime is often the most mysterious because it presents no new or special features from which deductions may be drawn. This murder would have been infinitely more difficult to unravel had the body of the victim been simply found lying in the roadway without any of those outré and sensational accompaniments which have rendered it remarkable. These strange details, far from making the case more difficult, have really had the effect of making it less so.

It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.

A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman's love, however badly he may have treated her.

There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.

The less experienced a doctor is, the higher are his notions of professional dignity . . .

What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.