The Viaduct Murder quotes

Nothing is ever wasted.

The death of the animal fertilizes the vegetable world: bees swarm in the disused pillar-box; sooner or later, somebody will find a use for the munition-factories.

Acres, that for centuries have scorned the weight of the plough, have their stubborn glebe broken with the niblick, and overpopulated greens recall the softness and the trimness of earlier lawns.

Ghosts of an earlier day will walk there, perhaps, but you can always play through them.

Paston Oatvile (distrust the author whose second paragraph does not come to ground in the particular) seemed to have been specially adapted by an inscrutable Providence for such a niche in the scheme of things.

Marryatt, fortunately, knew him well enough to interrupt him.

“It’s the sort of afternoon,” he said darkly, “on which one wants to murder somebody, just to relieve one’s feelings.”

“You would be wrong,” said Reeves. “Think of the footmarks you’d be bound to leave behind you in mud like this. You would be caught in no time.”

It showed the outlines of a man.

A dog sleeps on the alert, with the visible threat of waking at any moment. A man’s sleep is like the sleep of the horse; it imitates death.

Reeves’s first idea was that this man who lay so still must be a tramp who had strayed off the London high-road, and was taking his siesta in the lee of the viaduct.

There is no surer soporific than sleeping over a problem, no more fallacious method of attempting a solution.

After murmuring to himself three times, “Let’s see; there was something about watches,” Mordaunt Reeves fell into a sleep which anybody but a psychoanalyst would have called dreamless.

“That’s far the best principle,” agreed Gordon. “

Always tell the truth, and people will never believe you.

”

Then he stepped quickly across to the lamp, and turned it sideways so as to throw the light full on the wall. And then they too turned a little pale.

The photograph had smiled.

There was, to be sure, only the faintest flicker of a smile on the lips; you could not give any formula of it or trace the lines of it.

we thought it best to work on our own until we could present them with a fait accompli. That is why we have not even mentioned to the police the existence of this photograph which we found on the body.”

A woman can use a surname as a bludgeon.

That title of respect, “Mr. So-and-So,” which expresses our relations to the outside world, has often, indeed, had an ominous ring for us. Deans used it when they were protesting at our neglect of chapels;

“It’s a curious thing,” he gasped on recovering, “that one always used to say, when one was small, that one’s drink had ‘gone the wrong way.’ Nothing at all to do with the windpipe, I believe.”

The funeral was, it must be confessed, a riot of irony.

The members who attended had decided that it would look bad to take their clubs with them to the churchyard, but their costumes were plainly a compromise between respect for the dead and a determination to get on with business as soon as it was …

Or they will tell you that a concept is the same as a mental picture, or that Truth is the same as beauty, or as intellectual convenience, or that matter is a form of motion.

The root of error is always one of those false identifications, saying that A is B when it isn’t.

“ ‘The cause of them is a rage for the simplification of experience, the result is a paralysis of thought. There is a sense of neatness and efficiency about identifying Davenant with Brotherhood;

“I know. The police will never look at our objections until they lead us to find the real man.

The police always want to have a victim.

”

“I am afraid that a person entering a room and taking a book away does not commonly leave very much mark on the surroundings. Let’s take a look round, by all means—it’s Sunday, after all, and the housemaid won’t have been dusting.

Maids, you will notice, always polish the grates on Sunday but do not dust the rooms; why, I cannot say.

Whereabouts did you put the book, Reeves?”

Now, I wonder if he poked about in the other shelves at all? Most people, when they are looking for a book, take out one or two of the other books in mere inadvertent curiosity.

Extraordinary the fascination that books have.

I am told that Whitewell, at Oxford, loses twenty pounds’ worth of books a year by theft, as the result of letting people prowl round his shop at their pleasure. Ah! Reeves, your room is an excellent subject for the detective.”

“

Yes, most inconsiderate of him to confess just when you’d arranged to clap the darbies on another man.

Lucky for you you hadn’t said anything to Marryatt about it.”

“No, hang it all, it would be unfair to complain of that.

It’s better for the doctors to have a false theory than no theory at all.

They make mistakes, but sooner or later they find out they were wrong. It’s bad luck on all the people who happen to have died from getting the wrong treatment, but still, we did our best.

and yet they have gone on so long without being positively disproved that everybody talks as if they were proved. The scientist still treats evolution as a theory, the educationalist treats it as a fact.

There’s a curious sort of statute of limitations in the learned world which makes it impossible to call a man a liar if he has gone on lying successfully for fifty years.

But, after all, there’s something to be said for the Evolutionists. They did set out to explain a real problem, why there should be more than one kind of thing in the world; and they don’t even profess to have explained it.

Then you tell him that he is losing his temper, which is the sign of a strong inhibition somewhere, and that’s just what you were saying all along.

The beauty of psychoanalysis is that it’s all ‘Heads-I-win-tails-you-lose.’

In medicine, your diagnosis of fever is a trifle disconcerted if the patient’s temperature is subnormal. In psychoanalysis you say, ‘Ah, that just proves what I was saying.’ ”

Public interest in the subject is so small that it is very unlikely anyone will take the trouble to contradict you. If the worst comes to the worst, you can always fall back upon literary criticism, and there you are on perfectly safe ground.

A man with a documentary hypothesis can defy the rudest assaults of common sense.

”

You see the idea? Now, the more of that business you do, the more ingenious your theory becomes, and the more ingenious your theory becomes, the more easily will people accept it as true.

Half the statements which we regard as facts in history and criticism are statements made by critics, which are so ingenious that nobody has the heart to doubt them.

And so the silly old world goes on. What if our forefathers are misjudged? We keep our mouths, not our ears, to the metaphone, and the honourable gentlemen get no opportunity to reply: