Never trust to general impressions, my boy, but concentrate yourself upon details.

Keep your revolver near you night and day, and never relax your precautions.

A study in scarlet, eh? Why shouldn't we use a little art jargon? There's the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.

The unexpected has happened so continually in my life that it has ceased to deserve the name.

It is, I admit, mere imagination; but how often is imagination the mother of truth?

For the one and only time I caught a glimpse of a great heart as well as of a great brain.

Man, or at least criminal man, has lost all enterprise and originality. As to my own little practice, it seems to be degenerating into an agency for recovering lost lead pencils and giving advice to young ladies from boarding-schools.