You mentioned your name as if I should recognize it, but beyond the obvious facts that you are a bachelor, a solicitor, a freemason, and an asthmatic, I know nothing whatever about you.

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.

As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.

You will, I am sure, agree with me that... if page 534 only finds us in the second chapter, the length of the first one must have been really intolerable.

The most difficult crime to track is the one which is purposeless.

I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children.