Top 70 Laurie R. King Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Laurie R. King

2. “Using insult instead of argument is the sign of a small mind.”

— Laurie R. King

3. “That’s what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.”

— Laurie R. King

4. “The words given voice inside the mind are not always clear, however; they can be gentle and elliptical, what the prophets call the bat qol, the daughter of the voice of God, she who speaks in whispers and half-seen images.”

— Laurie R. King

5. “Most damning of phrases: He meant well.”

— Laurie R. King

6. “You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.”

— Laurie R. King

7. “Holmes, I’m a 24 year old prude.”

— Laurie R. King

8. “Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.”

— Laurie R. King

9. “I think very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives. It all depends on a combination of circumstances. If all the various cosmic thingummys fuse at the same moment, and the right spark is struck, there’s no knowing what one mightn’t do.”

— Laurie R. King

10. “I was merely going to say that I hope you realise that guilt is a poor foundation for a life, without other motivations beside it.”

— Laurie R. King

11. “I crawled into my book and pulled the pages over my head...”

— Laurie R. King

12. “Madam, there is no treachery in the truth. There may be pain, but to face honestly all possible conclusions formed by a set of facts is the noblest route possible for a human being.” Holmes could be surprisingly empathetic at times, and his words now had a gentling effect on the lady.”

— Laurie R. King

13. “Guessing is a weakness brought on by indolence and should never be confused with intuition.”

— Laurie R. King

14. “What does it mean, to lose one’s mind? Where does it go? If a man is out of his mind, where is he? What is insane when the world is mad by contrast?”

— Laurie R. King

15. “Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steam-roller of deadlines and details straight at one’s daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage.”

— Laurie R. King

16. “Why the devil was my husband positively grinning – and with what looked remarkably like relief?”

— Laurie R. King

17. “Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.”

— Laurie R. King

18. “I think not. I find short hair too much fuss, always needing combing and cutting. Long hair is much easier, oddly enough.” There.”

— Laurie R. King

19. “You envy me my educated tastes.”

— Laurie R. King

20. “The period after the First World War was an extremely different time, so that Sherlock Holmes would have been a different person following 1918 than he was during the Victorian era.”

— Laurie R. King

21. “Isolate her, and however abundant the food or favourable the temperature, she will expire in a few days not of hunger or cold, but of loneliness.”

— Laurie R. King

22. “I have never found ‘luck’ a dependable companion.”

— Laurie R. King

23. “When the choice came down to tears, strong drink, or potatoes, one chooses potatoes. She.”

— Laurie R. King

24. “I slept in the bedroom used by Sabine Baring-Goulds wife when I was researching The Moor, and later the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor.”

— Laurie R. King

25. “Moments of pure relaxation were rare for me. There was always the nagging of books unread, work undone, time a-wasting.”

— Laurie R. King

26. “However, the mind has an amazing ability to continue worrying away at a problem all on its own, so that when the “Eureka!” comes it is as mysterious as if it were God speaking.”

— Laurie R. King

27. “I did not think of myself as a detective; I was a student of theology, and I was to spend my life in exploration, not of the darker crannies of human misbehaviour, but of the heights of human speculation concerning the nature of the Divine. That the two were not unrelated did not occur to me for years.”

— Laurie R. King

28. “For a man who claimed not to care much for women, Mr Holmes sure found some strong ones.”

— Laurie R. King

29. “The lust for murder is not a rational thing. In queens, it is an instinctual response.”

— Laurie R. King

30. “I had given Holmes this wedding as a gift-only to have him turn around and hand it back to me tenfold. And now his two oldest friends in all the world had conspired against our plans, casually rendering our feeble attempts at a gift into solid gold.”

— Laurie R. King

31. “The dead have a claim on us even heavier than that of the living, for they cannot hear our explanations, and we cannot ask their forgiveness.”

— Laurie R. King

32. “In silent films, quite complex plots are built around action, setting, and the actors gestures and facial expressions, with a very few storyboards to nail down specific plot points.”

— Laurie R. King

33. “You did tell me what a very superior sort of mind your friend has. What a pity he was born trapped in a man’s body.”

— Laurie R. King

34. “Pride is a sweetmeat, to be savoured in small pieces; it makes for a poor feast.”

— Laurie R. King

35. “In reflecting back the respect others had for the name and the title, this child had already begun to take into himself those qualities which justified the respect.”

— Laurie R. King

36. “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...”

— Laurie R. King

37. “No doubt after the emperor was overthrown in 1911, your gardener would have joined the rest of the world in cutting the queue and taking on the laws and customs of his adoptive land. Before that, his assuming Western dress would have been dangerous for his family in China.”

— Laurie R. King

38. “He said nothing. Very sarcastically.”

— Laurie R. King

39. “The response to a festering sore was not to extol its virtues, but to lance the thing and let the poison bleed out.”

— Laurie R. King

40. “The house was still, weighty with the comfort of a thousand books.”

— Laurie R. King

41. “Don’t stride so, Russell!” Holmes whispered fiercely. “Throw your boots out in front of you as you walk and let your elbows stick out a bit. It would help if you let your mouth hang open stupidly, and for God’s sake take off your glasses, at least until we get out of town. I won’t allow you to walk into anything. Do you think you could persuade your nose to drip a bit, just for the effect?”

— Laurie R. King

42. “Eccentricty had flowered into madness.”

— Laurie R. King

43. “First and foremost a pragmatist, he had no time for the interference of unnecessary standards.”

— Laurie R. King

44. “I mean really: If even Conan Doyle hungered to shove Holmes off a tall cliff, surely a young female of obvious intelligence would have brained the detective on first sight.”

— Laurie R. King

45. “When you’re putting together a story, sometimes you just have to skip over the boring bits.”

— Laurie R. King

46. “You see why I married her, Mycroft? The exquisite juxtaposition of ladylike threads and backhanded compliments proved irresistible.”

— Laurie R. King

47. “You translate it, please. I have worked hard to forget what Greek I once knew.”

— Laurie R. King

48. “Madam, there is no treachery in the truth. There may be pain, but to face honestly all possible conclusions formed by a set of facts is the noblest route possible for a human being.”

— Laurie R. King

49. “Interpreting the Bible without training is a bit like finding a specific address in a foreign city with neither map nor knowledge of the language. You might stumble upon the right answer, but in the meantime you’ve put yourself at the mercy of every ignoramus in town, with no way of telling the savant from the fool.”

— Laurie R. King

50. “XVXVI, or 10-5-10-5-1, yielded H-E-H-E-A, which, unless she wanted to show her derisive laughter, made no sense.”

— Laurie R. King