Absolute nakedness was intrusive, confusing to the senses. Paradoxically, it both revealed and diminished identity.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

In 1930s mysteries, all sorts of motives were credible which aren't credible today, especially motives of preventing guilty sexual secrets from coming out. Nowadays, people sell their guilty sexual secrets.

If you are proposing to commit a sin it is as well to commit it with intelligence. Otherwise you are insulting God as well as defying Him, don't you think?

People were excited by violence. What, after all, was the sexual act but a voluntarily endured assault, a momentary death?

Read widely and with discrimination. Bad writing is contagious.

you'd like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That must be the most futile oath anyone ever swears.