You know, my mother once told me "Never go someplace where you're not welcome."
— You might be wired for sound, and there's only one way to find out, and I'm not sure you'd enjoy it.
— How do you know I wouldn't?
Obviously, any woman who eats by sufferance without a legal contract would prefer not to eat alone.
Then this is a remarkable coincidence. In a world that operates largely at random coincidences are to be expected but each one of them must always be mistrusted.
— During the seven months that you lived with Miss Usher did she have any callers?
— She never had any.
— Do you mean to say that she had no friends... men or women?
— I never saw any. She never even had a date; she never even got any phone calls. I used to tell her, "Faith, that's no way to live just crawling around like a worm like that."
Archie... I said it is vainglorious to reproach yourself for lack of omniscience. The same is true for omnipotence.
— But you were an agent of the Austrian government?
— As a boy. I quit.
— And then you joined the Montenegrin army?
— Still a boy, immature. I believed then that all misguided people should be shot. I shot some.
— There's no discipline in this country, Mr. Wolfe.
— I wouldn't say that. We submit to traffic cops and sanitary codes. We are extremely fond of certain liberties.
— Intimate or not, you’ve known this girl for three years. Did she kill that man?
— Yes and no.
— That doesn’t help.
— Yes, chiefly because she asked me to come here, change my story and back hers up.
— I didn’t kill him!
— And the no is a little less direct you see, when a man gets a girl pregnant, her normal reaction is to make him marry her, not kill him. See, the thing she wants most is a father for the baby, and a dead one is no good.
— That’s silly, I’m not pregnant. There’s only one way a girl can get pregnant, and it couldn’t have been that with me because it’s never happened.
— This, uh, is in the strictest of confidence.
— Ah, yes, well, of course. Unless you’re loaded with something too heavy for me, like murder or treason.
— "Other sins only speak, murder shrieks out. Treason doth never prosper." Fear not, Mr. Goodwin, I am loaded with neither.
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