Home > Work > If Death Ever Slept (Nero Wolfe, #29)
1 " All there was to it, he was in a panic. He was scared stiff that any minute a fact might come bouncing in that would force him to send me down to Cramer bearing gifts, and there was practically nothing on earth he wouldn't rather do, even eating ice cream with cantaloupe or horseradish on oysters. "
― Rex Stout , If Death Ever Slept (Nero Wolfe, #29)
2 " He wrote short and he wrote often, which tended to obscure the fact that he wrote well. Unless it leads to obscurity, brevity is rarely praised (or employed) in the journals of, ah, serious literary criticism, and frequency is often equated with frivolity. "
3 " If he does it right and is lucky, in nine or 10 months he scoops the tiny half-inch seedlings out of the bottle and plants them in community pots. A year later he transplants them to individual three-inch pots and in another two years to 4 1/2-inch pots, and crosses his fingers. Then, five or six or seven years since the day he put pollen to stigma, he sees an orchid no one ever saw before. It is different from any orchid that has ever bloomed, including those in the Garden of Eden. "
4 " The toughest guy I ever ran into had cheeks that needed a brassière. "
5 " closet, "
6 " Perhaps you don’t know all there is to know about a woman after watching her at an evening of bridge, but you should know more than when you sat down. "