“Eccentricty had flowered into madness.”

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

“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.”

“-in New York, a cat could look at a king. Hell, a cat could get himself elected king. But in England, where people had windows reminding them of ancestors whose bones had long since gone to dust? In England, the country that had perfected the art of the devastating remark? In England, where the servants' entrance waited, where all ears were tuned for the tiniest wrong accent, where the exquisitely subtle vocabulary of Us and Them held ten thousand complicated traps, uspoken and unarguable?”

“I took the broom and made a wild sweep along the workbench, and an edge of the unwieldy head sent a tray of tools flying. Patrick picked up a chipped chisel and looked at me as if I had attacked his son. "Have you never used a broom before?”

“But a topee is not a turban, and I had been my teacher's pupil before I became my husband's wife, learning to my bones that half a disguise is none at all...The moment my short-cropped, pomade-sleek, unquestionably masculine hair passed beneath his nose was the closest thing I've ever seen Holmes to fainting dead away.”

“Holmes had cultivated the ability to still the noise of the mind, by smoking his pipe and playing nontunes on the violin. He once compared this mental state with the sort of passive seeing that enables the eye, in a dim light or at a great distance, to grasp details with greater clarity by focusing slightly to one side of the object of interest. When active, strained vision only obscures and frustrates, looking away often permits the eyes to see and interpret the shapes of what it sees. Thus does inattention allow the mind to register the still, small whisper of the daughter of the voice.”