Colin Dexter Quotes

He sighed and knew that life was full of 'if only' for everyone

This was exactly why holidays were so valuable, he told himself: they allowed you to stand back a bit, and see where you were going rusty.

There's always time for one more pint. - Chief Inspector Morse

He was somewhat of a loner by temperament
because though never wholly happy when alone, he was usually slightly more miserable when with other people.

As a boy, he had been moved by those words of the dying Socrates, suggesting that if death were just one long, unbroken, dreamless sleep, then a greater boon could hardly be bestowed upon mankind.

Morse poured himself a can of beer. Champagne's a lovely drink, but it makes you thirsty, doesn't it?

The coolness of the wall mirror. He

The secret of a happy life, Lewis, is to know when to stop and then to go that little bit further.

Nothing quite like it in the whole history of music," announced Morse magisterially, after Brünnhilde had ridden into the flames and the waves of the Rhine had finally rippled into silence.

"You think so?"
"Don't you?"
"I prefer Elizabethan madrigals, really."
For a few moments Morse said nothing, saddened by her lack of sensitivity, it seemed.

During the few minutes that Lewis was away, Morse was acutely conscious of the truth of the proposition that the wider the circle of knowledge the greater the circumference of ignorance.

He poured himself a good measure of Glenfiddich; and shortly thereafter fell deeply asleep in the chair for more than two hours. Bliss.

Clever people seem not to feel the natural pleasure of bewilderment, and are always answering questions when the chief relish of a life is to go on asking them (Frank Moore Colby)

Morse stared morosely at the blotting paper. It's just not my sort of case, Lewis. I know it's not a very nice thing to say, but I just get on better when we've got a body - a body that died from unnatural causes. That's all I ask. And we haven't got a body.

Walters looked quizzically at Morse, who sat reading one of the glossy 'porno' magazines he had brought from upstairs.
"You still sex-mad, I see, Morse," said the surgeon.
"I don't seem to be able to shake it off, Max." Morse turned over a page. "And you don't improve much either, do you? You've been examining all our bloody corpses for donkey's years, and you still refuse to tell us when they died.

She had the inestimable merit of being interesting.

I write every day when I'm at home - trying to catch up with correspondence.

Morse firmly believed that there was nothing so unsatisfactory as this kind of halfway house pornography; he liked it hot or not at all.

Those who are absent, by its means become present: correspondence is the consolation of life. - VOLTAIRE, Philosophical Dictionary

Was he really looking forward to it? They were usually a bit of anticlimax, these things. Stillit would do him good. Or serve him right