“Jock put his shoulder to the framework and the whole thing crumbled inward with a crash of glass. "Rotten as touch-wood," he said. "This place would never stand a siege.”

“I am an ordinary sort of fellow, not braver than other people, but I hate to see a good man downed, and that long knife would not be the end of Scudder if I could play the game in his place.”

“He felt singularly light-hearted, and the immediate cause was his safety razor. A week ago he had bought the thing in a sudden fit of enterprise, and now he shaved in five minutes, where before he had taken twenty, and no longer confronted his fellows, at least one day in three, with a countenance ludicrously mottled by sticking-plaster.”

“I began to get really keen, for every man at the bottom of his heart believes that he is a born detective.”

“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”

“We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves.”

“It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep a man from yawning.”