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

Categorized in : Thinking People Knowing

It is an amazing thing, the difference to one’s powers of concentration a pair of comfortable shoes can make.

Laurie R. King

pairs shoes differences

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

fool female helping

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

Laurie R. King

pages book

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

Laurie R. King

insult argument mind

Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.

Laurie R. King

fire-of-love thrown fire

Most damning of phrases: He meant well.

Laurie R. King

wells phrases

I undid the wrappings with great curiosity, for Holmes did not normally give gifts. I opened the dark velvet jewller's box and found inside a shiny new set of picklocks, a younger version of his own. "Holmes, ever the romantic. Mrs. Hudson would be pleased.

Laurie R. King

curiosity dark giving

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

daily-life details leaving

...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

Laurie R. King

turmoil centre madness

Now, I'm as appreciative as the next obsessive-compulsive recovering-academic of the vast riches of material becoming available online, thanks to all those Google scanners crouched in the basements of libraries around the world, madly feeding books through their machines. I download obscure tomes onto my iPad and give thanks to the dual gods Gates and Jobs, singing hymns to all the lesser pantheon of geniuses. But there's nothing like a book.

Laurie R. King

hymns jobs book

That's what tears are for, you know, to wash away the fear and cool the hate.

Laurie R. King

hate tears fear

I took to the Bodleian Library as to a lover and ... would sit long hours in Bodley's arms, to emerge, blinking and dazed with the smell and feel of all those books.

Laurie R. King

library long book

. . . the first spring in five free from the rumour of guns across the Channel, a spring anxious to make up for the cold winter, life bursting out after four years of death. All of England raised her face to the sun. . .

Laurie R. King

gun winter spring

I became, in other words, more like Holmes than the man himself: brilliant, driven to a point of obsession, careless of myself, mindless of others, but without the passion and the deep-down, inbred love for the good in humanity that was the basis of his entire career. He loved the humanity that could not understand or fully accept him; I, in the midst of the same human race, became a thinking machine.

Laurie R. King

passion men thinking

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

mysterious mind worry

Do not neglect to bring your revolver, Russell. It may be needed, and it does us no good in your drawer with that disgusting cheese." "My lovely Stilton; it's almost ripe, too. I do hope Mr. Thomas enjoys it." "Any riper and it will eat through the woodwork and drop into the room below." "You envy me my educated tastes." "That I will not honour with a response. Get out the door, Russell.

Laurie R. King

lovely envy doors

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

daughter voice mind

Libraries made me - as a reader, as a writer, and as a human being.

Laurie R. King

library reader made

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

mad men mean

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

Laurie R. King

pieces poor pride