Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.

The last dog I had was an Irish wolfhound - now that is a dog. Rather spoils a person for a lesser canine, that is, anything under a hundredweight.

That's what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.

It was hypnotic, and then it was unsettling, and finally I became aware of another entity in my universe, sitting on the shore two hundred yards away, smoking a pipe.

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In my defense I must say it was an engrossing book, and it was very rare to come across another person in that particular part of the world in that war year of 1915.

The hand of bone and sinew and flesh achieves its immortality in taking up a pen. The hand on a page wields a greater power than the fleshly hand ever could in life.

I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.