“I can deal with anything, as long as I know it's the truth. It's the lies that are hard.”
“You're the first girl who's had the guts to touch my controls.”
“I want to be the one protecting you.”
“You have the poutiest lips I've ever seen."
"Pouty?' I snorted. "Like I look bratty?"
"Like you look kissable.”
“He nodded, his forehead fused with mine. "My head fogs when you kiss me like that. I can't think," he murmured.
"It does?" I grinned. "I like making your head fog." I kissed him again.”
“You feel control drain away like sand falling from your fingertips. You can't hold onto it. It's gone. And so are you.”
“But there you are. Helpless. Unable to defend yourself. Vulnerable. Victim.”
“Thirty minutes until I saw Weston. I shouldn't be this excited about a ride home.”
“For instance, the scientific article may say, 'The radioactive phosphorus content of the cerebrum of the rat decreases to one- half in a period of two weeks.' Now what does that mean?
It means that phosphorus that is in the brain of a rat—and also in mine, and yours—is not the same phosphorus as it was two weeks ago. It means the atoms that are in the brain are being replaced: the ones that were there before have gone away.
So what is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness? Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in my mind a year ago—a mind which has long ago been replaced. To note that the thing I call my individuality is only a pattern or dance, that is what it means when one discovers how long it takes for the atoms of the brain to be replaced by other atoms. The atoms come into my brain, dance a dance, and then go out—there are always new atoms, but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday.”
“The two men sat silent for a little, and then Lord Peter said:
"D'you like your job?"
The detective considered the question, and replied:
"Yes—yes, I do. I know it to be useful, and I am fitted to it. I do it quite well—not with inspiration, perhaps, but sufficiently well to take a pride in it. It is full of variety and it forces one to keep up to the mark and not get slack. And there's a future to it. Yes, I like it. Why?"
"Oh, nothing," said Peter. "It's a hobby to me, you see. I took it up when the bottom of things was rather knocked out for me, because it was so damned exciting, and the worst of it is, I enjoy it—up to a point. If it was all on paper I'd enjoy every bit of it. I love the beginning of a job—when one doesn't know any of the people and it's just exciting and amusing. But if it comes to really running down a live person and getting him hanged, or even quodded, poor devil, there don't seem as if there was any excuse for me buttin' in, since I don't have to make my livin' by it. And I feel as if I oughtn't ever to find it amusin'. But I do.”
“It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns out to be writing about men.”
“If the feet of enlightenment moved, the great ocean would overflow; If that head bowed, it would look down upon the heavens.
Such a body has no place to rest. . . .
Let another continue this poem.”
“When a woman had eyes that big, that brown, that beautiful, she probably got whatever she wanted without saying a word.”
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