20 Quotes by Jedediah Berry

To the modern detective, truth is rarely its own reward; usually it is its own punishment. And if you cannot track mystery to the back of its ugly cave, then be content to stand at the edge of the dark and call it by name.

His mind lingered for a time in the hinterlands of sleep, words drifting over the border as though on a warm wind, unfastened from their meanings.

Unwin was tired, too. He had worn himself down—to nothing, nearly—with his cuts and corrections, his erasures and emendations. He was awake now, but was there still time for him? His mind had wearied of its appointed rounds, of the stream of typescript and transcript, and now he wondered what might have been different, what might still be different, if only the day would hold and not abandon him to sleep.

Greenwood wasn’t happy to see me. And I saw a look on her face, one I’d never seen there before. I think it was surprise, but we might need a new name for it, just because it was hers.

At home he went about in his socks. That way he could avoid disturbing the neighbors and also indulge in the occasional shoeless swoop across the room, as when one is preparing a breakfast of oatmeal and the oatmeal wants raisins and brown sugar, which are in the cupboard at the other end of the room. To glide with sock-swaddled feet over a world of glossy planes: that would be a wondrous thing! But Unwin’s apartment was smallish at best, and the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome.

She was beautiful, in the quiet way that lonely, unnoticed people are beautiful to those who notice them.

If you are not setting a trap, then you are probably walking into one. It is the mark of the master to do both at once.

Woe to he who checkmates his opponents at last, only to discover they have been playing cribbage.

The world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome.