“And she's got brains enough for two, which is the exact quantity the girl who marries you will need.”

It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.

To say that New York came up to its advance billing would be the baldest of understatements. Being there was like being in heaven without going to all the bother and expense of dying.

A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who has searched for the leak in life’s gas-pipe with a lighted candle.

Naturally a detective doesn't want to look like a detective, and give the whole thing away right at the start.

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

It was my uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of medical thought.

I remember her telling me once that rabbits were the gnomes in attendance to the Fairy Queen and that the stars were God's daisy chain. Perfect rot, of course.

Luck is a goddess not to be coerced and forcibly wooed by those who seek her favors.

Love,' she said, 'seems to pump me full of vitamins. It makes me feel as if the sun were shining and my hat was right and my shoes were right and my frock was right and my stockings were right, and somebody had just left me ten thousand a year.'