#mysteries

The face of a lover is an unknown, precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment. ↗

— James A. Baldwin

#containing #face #invested #like #lover

To those who ask what the infinitely small quantity in mathematics is, we answer that it is actually zero. Hence there are not so many mysteries hidden in this concept as they are usually believed to be. ↗

— Leonhard Euler

#answer #ask #believed #concept #hence

Very strange things comes to our knowledge in families, miss; bless your heart, what you would think to be phenomenons, quite ... Aye, and even in gen-teel families, in high families, in great families ... and you have no idea ... what games goes on! ↗

— Charles Dickens

#detectives #families #family-life #gentility #hidden-guilt

It was the second time in a row they were expecting us. We’ve got an informer in our group.” Johannes aka ‘BB’ The Informer by Steen Langstrup ↗

— Steen Langstrup

#noir-fiction #sabotage-group-bb #scandinavian-mysteries #world-war- #thriller

I feel as though I have lived many lives, experienced the heights and depths of each and like the waves of the ocean, never known rest. Throughout the years, I have looked always for the unusual, for the wonderful, for the mysteries at the heart of life. ↗

— Leni Riefenstahl

#depths #each #experienced #feel #heart

Personally I like the English style better. It is not quite so brittle, and the people as a rule, just wear clothes and drink drinks. There is more sense of background, as if Cheesecake Manor really existed all around and not just the part the camera sees; there are more long walks over the Downs and the characters don’t all try to behave as if they had just been tested by MGM. The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers. ↗

— Raymond Chandler

#murder-mysteries #art

Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries. ↗

— Sam Starbuck

#engineer #mysteries #the-dead-isle #trains #beauty

The detective story, as created by Poe, is something as specialised and as intellectual as a chess problem, whereas the best English detective fiction has relied less on the beauty of the mathematical problem and much more on the intangible human element. [...] In The Moonstone the mystery is finally solved, not altogether by human ingenuity, but largely by accident. Since Collins, the best heroes of English detective fiction have been, like Sergeant Cuff, fallible. ↗

— T.S. Eliot

#detective-stories #detectives #mysteries #beauty

We cut down trees that do not bear fruit! We have to bring back the death penalty! It’s the only way to deal with evil.” “Would you execute anyone else, now that you’re in a groove?” Conversation on Radio Fake 112.8 MHz In The Shadow of Sadd ↗

— Steen Langstrup

#scandinavian-mysteries #death

Perhaps this is the purpose of detective investigations, real and fictional -- to transform sensation, horror and grief into a puzzle, and then to solve the puzzle, to make it go away. 'The detective story,' observed Raymond Chandler in 1949, 'is a tragedy with a happy ending.' A storybook detective starts by confronting us with a murder and ends by absolving us of it. He clears us of guilt. He relieves us of uncertainty. He removes us from the presence of death. ↗

— Kate Summerscale

#crime #detective-stories #detectives #investigations #mysteries