Private Detective Quotes

Because sometimes it's better to believe in the impossible. To believe you are a secret agent or a private detective or a superhero and not just a kid with freckled cheeks and gangly arms who is too clumsy to leap a tipped-over garbage can in a single bound.
Until you are lying in the middle of the sidewalk, with a throbbing ankle and bloody chin, wishing you hadn't even tried. ~ John David Anderson

In 1850 Allan Pinkerton founded the first American private detective agency; in advertisements, the company motto, "We Never Sleep" was inscribed under a large, unblinking Masonic-like eye, which gave rise to the term "private eye".... William J. Burns was an avid user of a Dictograph- a primitive listening device that could be concealed in anything from a clock to a chandelier.... Just as Allan Pinkerton, in the nineteenth century was known as the eye, Burns, In the twentieth century had become "the ear". ~ David Grann

Some lines you just don't cross. Not in my business."
"Your business?" Georgia rolled her eyes. "You mean the private detective business? I wasn't aware you guys had such ironclad rules about making out with clients." She ignored the choking sound he made. "Seriously, have you even seen The Maltese Falcon?"
Darius' face heated. "This isn't some movie, Ms. Clare. You're not Mary Astor, and I'm sure as hell no Humphrey Bogart. Here in the real world, there are rules. ~ Laura Oliva

There was a teapot, in which Mma Ramotswe
the only lady private detective in Botwana
brewed tea. And three mugs
one for herself, one for her secretary, and one for the client. What else does a detective agency really need? ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Hidden in a toolbox, in the rafters of his four-car garage, was an envelope full of pictures taken by a private detective...They were pictures of a scrawny, boyish looking nine year old with a wide mouth and a tangle of brown hair...Her eyes were oblong and deep set, their color hidden from the camera by the slant of the sun. The angles and planes of her face were oddly beautiful just then, in that moment, frozen on Kodak paper. A hint of the woman she would someday become. ~ Shirley A. Martin

I came to believe that being a private detective was the work I was meant to do. ~ Shirley Jackson

A selection of quotes from The Night of Harrison Monk's Death (Jane Hetherington's Adventures in Detection: 1)
"Is this one of the more unusual cases of safe-breaking you've been asked to investigate, Mrs Hetherington?"
"Remember your private detective wants to be able to sleep soundly at night and in their own bed, not one supplied as her Majesty's pleasure."
"It seems to be an open and shut case doesn't it? But it's not you know? How do you know if anything is what it seems?"
"But where is Cheung kin?"
"When I first set eyes on your father, he was spying on a man from between two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica."
"I don't think I need say more." "On the contrary, if you want me to have any idea what you're talking about, I think you do."
"Why don't you report it to the police?" "Because I stole it in the first place didn't I?"
"It's something of a mystery, I admit."
"Vanished into thin air!"
"You sound so sensible Mrs Hetherington. Please help us get to the bottom of this."
Ah, thought Jane – the old story.
"No body was found?"
"Shall I put the kettle on?" "Only if you fill it with whiskey."
"The course of true love didn't run smoothly for me either, you know."
"Life has its tragedies for sure."
"… What do I want? I want money that's what I want. I want money."
She was even more horrified by the words she heard next.
Callum MacCallum knew what it was like to be an outsider. ~ Nina Jon

He was too young to deserve a weight of the world sign like the one he expelled. ~ Mickey Spillane, Max Allan Collins

Matthew kept hinting that Strike was somehow a fake. He seemed to feel that being a private detective was a far-fetched job, like astronaut or lion tamer; that real people did not do such things. ~ Robert Galbraith

It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark little clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn't care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars. ~ Raymond Chandler

Flambeau, once the most famous criminal in France and later a very private detective in England, had long retired from both professions. Some say a career of crime had left him with too many scruples for a career of detection. Anyhow, after a life of romantic escapes and tricks of evasion, he had ended at what some might consider an appropriate address; a castle in Spain. [ ... ] Flambeau had casually and almost abruptly fallen in love with a Spanish lady, married and brought up a large family on a Spanish estate, without displaying any apparent desire to stray again beyond its borders. ~ G.K. Chesterton

Injustice, large and small, was like sour, moldy bread. Consumed often enough, it brought on hunger for the meat of revenge. ~ B.V. Lawson

Nolly Wolfstan, private detective, had the teeth of a god and a face so unfortunate that it argued convincingly against the existence of a benign deity. ~ Dean Koontz

Two dead men changed the course of my life that fall. One of them I knew and the other I'd never laid eyes on until I saw him in the morgue. The first was Pete Wolinsky, an unscrupulous private detective I'd met years before through Byrd-Shine Investigations, where I'd served my apprenticeship. I worked for Ben Byrd and Morley Shine for three years, amassing the six thousand hours I needed for my license. The two were old-school private eyes, hard-working, tireless, and inventive. While Ben and Morley did business with Pete on occasion, they didn't think much of him. He was morally shabby, disorganized, and irresponsible with money. ~ Sue Grafton

Shouldering the duffel bag with the Marine Corps bulldog, Old Man knocked Jan's photo off the bed table. He turned to stone staring down at the photo. His face then splintered into hurt. Tears seeped into his eyes. He grappled for the nearest bedpost and slumped forward on extended arms. His shoulders jerked and head sagged a little while his heart broke. Old Man cried the mute cry of men of his generation. ~ Ed Lynskey

Mars and Venus are at it again. This time, Hephaestus is standing by with a private detective, a photographer, and a lawyer. ~ Mason Cooley

They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o'-shanter which wasn't any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.
I was looking at him across my office desk at about four-thirty when the phone rang and I heard a cool, supercilious voice that sounded as if it thought it was pretty good. It said drawlingly, after I had answered:
You are Philip Marlowe, a private detective? ~ Raymond Chandler

This is the last time I ever get a private detective off the internet. ~ Sophie Kinsella

Tailing someone is like maintaining a relationship: you keep at it until they give you the slip, or until they confirm everything you suspect them of. ~ Mark Crutchfield

You're a cop aren't you?
A private detective.
Isn't that the same thing?
The cops guarantee order. All I do is uncover disorder. ~ Manuel Vazquez Montalban

I used to work as a private detective years and years ago. ~ Errol Morris

It was a dark, dismal afternoon, like they all seem to be
these days, when I got this call. I could hear the rain
battering the windowpane of my office when the phone rang. ~ C.S. Woolley

I am a private detective. I am paid to be inquisitive and presumptuous. ~ Douglas Adams

No visible scars. Hair dark brown, some gray. Eyes brown. Height six feet, one half inch. Weight about one ninety. Name Philip Marlowe. Occupation private detective. ~ Raymond Chandler

Even as I was writing 'Empire State,' I knew there were more adventures for the main character, private detective Rad Bradley, to have. I also knew that the world was far larger than what I'd presented in book one. ~ Adam Christopher

A woman could do a lot of crazy things for a pair of fine-looking dimples. ~ Amy Andrews

Our job involves looking at things that people usually can't see. ~ Fuminori Nakamura

Georgia gulped as the entire doorway suddenly filled with a man she didn't recognize. She'd been expecting Jesper MacMillian.
This was definitely not Jesper MacMillian.
This man had a rich black complexion. His head was bald- whether by nature or design, she couldn't be sure. Tiny studs flashed in his ears. He wore a beautiful black suit, painstakingly tailored to fit his massive shoulders. Dark tattoos curled just above his pressed white collar, and down below the edges of his cuffs.
His face was neither kind nor unkind. He studied her with vague disinterest, his eyes quiet and guarded beneath solid brows. ~ Laura Oliva

MacMillian steepled his fingers on the head of his cane. Anticipation rose in his chest. Lena and Cyrus Alan might have an advantage over him when it came to hunting ghosts, but this was where he excelled. This part of the game was all about patterns. He saw patterns. Always had. ~ Laura Oliva

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn't just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn't behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids' story? ~ Julian Barnes

It wasn't every day a witch came to see him.
Darius deCompostela gave up on the paperwork he'd been trying to fill out and leaned back in his chair. Semantics. Technically, Georgia Clare hadn't come to see him. She'd come to see MacMillian. Most people did, often with barely a sideways glance in his direction. Usually, that chafed.
Not this time. For one thing, her reluctance to speak with him didn't seem to have anything to do with, well, him.
For another thing, he didn't do witches. ~ Laura Oliva

Eli Hofstadter, Private Detective and Investigative services. I find ~ Callie Hart

Humanity thrown together in the equivalent of a Petri dish under a microscope bred malignant organisms as often as benign. ~ B.V. Lawson

You do know I'm not psychic, right?'
Dash looked down at her. 'Joy...you do know that normal people don't see ghosts, right? ~ Amy Andrews

I've actually published two compilations, if only barely. Hire a private detective and possibly you'll be able to locate them. One was called 'Violent Screen,' and the other 'Now Playing at the Valencia.' Bantam and Simon and Schuster. ~ Stephen Hunter

The critical scene of the mystery is when the detective enters. The action shifts to Sherlock's sitting room. The little Belgian man with the waxed moustache appears in the lobby of the grand hotel. The gentle old woman with a bag of knitting comes to visit her niece when the poison pen letters start going around the village. The private detective comes back to the office after a night of drinking and finds the woman with the cigarette and the veiled hat this is when things will change. ~ Maureen Johnson

Owing to the corner pick-up stops required in any case by buses, the short signal frequencies interfere with bus travel time less than long signal frequencies. These same shorter frequencies, unstaggered, constantly hold up and slow down private transportation, which would thereby be discouraged from using these particular streets. In turn, this would mean still less interference and more speed for buses. ~ Jane Jacobs

The bluejacket girlie rode like a clan warrior, but there was no way she'd escape. It was a private life-and-death contest that had nothing to do with him.
He told himself he should ride on, grateful that the chase would keep them occupied while he took a different path.
But what had he told Rebecca when she'd asked what he meant to do when he returned to the Fells?
'I'm tired of people in power picking on the weak. I'm going to help them. ~ Cinda Williams Chima

I found myself getting more publicly shy when the gala events and big crowds started. Some people embrace it. To me, it's not worth enough to risk my private life being public. ~ Matt Damon

It is true that the genius of assembled men or of peoples is quite different from a man's character in private, and that one would know the human heart very imperfectly if he did not examine it also in the multitude. But it is no less true that one must begin by studying man in order to judge men, and that he who knew each individual's inclinations perfectly could foresee all their effects when combined in the body of the people. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

One of the most fruitless, irritating wastes in the world is arguing-the contentious, endless kind of arguing that is akin to quarreling, and causes feuding in families and among friends, and leaves resentful feeling in homes, in hearts, in businesses and professions, and in all kinds of gatherings in public and private places, and in all relationships of life-and with so little that it ever seems to settle! ~ Richard L. Evans

For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected. ~ Virginia Woolf

Apart from the most obvious cases, like the Oriental Bittersweet vine, escaped from private gardens and smothering the mountains one acre at a time, the most painful proof of man's destruction is not what you can see right in front of you; it's what you will never see again. ~ Wil S. Hylton

In private, I may wear a bikini, but at the public beach with my kids, I would change bathing suits because they do not want to be hanging out with some old broad in a bikini. ~ Christie Brinkley

The freedom of speech of private individuals includes the right to not agree, not to listen, and not to finance one's own antagonists. ~ Ayn Rand

Expect the unexpected like a chain smoking, hard drinking, monochrome world dwelling Noir Detective ~ Dean Cavanagh

I've never been a person to share my private life, but I can help save lives. ~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

We all perform balancing acts between self and family, individual and community, private desire and group expectation. Gay people in particular must break with the groupthink of church and society in order to live their own lives. (It's why you still see half-read copies of Atlas Shrugged on the night tables of otherwise intelligent gay men.) ~ Christopher Bram

My private life is very private, and I have chosen not to live in America or England, where you are so exposed and can't fight against it. ~ Juliette Binoche

I've always said women are vicious creatures - Detective Zach Grimes ~ Lauren Bradshaw

It go at that, I should be obtaining the reader's interest under false pretences. He was really only a sort of detective, a species of sleuth. At Stafford's International Investigation Bureau, in the Strand, where he was employed, they did not require ~ P.G. Wodehouse

The path to a better future goes directly through our public schools. I have nothing against private schools, parochial schools and home schooling, and I think that parents with the means and inclination should choose whatever they believe is best for their children. But those choices cannot compete, and cannot come at the expense of what has been
and what must always be
the great equalizer in our society, a free and equal public education. ~ Howard Dean

Mere words will not do. They must convey the color, charm, and pulse of life. They must have a private twinkle of wit in them that makes a good-natured noise like laughter through the keyhole of the reader's mind. ~ Corra May Harris

Conservatives may worship Adam Smith's 'invisible hand,' but for Obama, the helping hand comes in large measure from the public, not the private sector. To call this 'socialism' is to do violence to the word and to the concept. To call it 'un-American' is a smear. ~ Jeff Greenfield

cloak of secrecy: the private asylums and single-lodging establishments, both ~ Catherine Bailey

I believe in a reasonable amount of "right to bear arms". But private citizens of the United States are not allowed to own nuclear weapons. I always wanted a nuclear weapon, if I could have gotten one. I'm every other kind of power, but I'm not a nuclear power. ~ Ted Turner

I haven't said it yet, but it seemed implied, that cinema for me was the American one, current Hollywood productions. "My" period goes roughly from The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Henry Hathaway, 1935) with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty (Frank Lloyd, 1935) with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable, to the death of Jean Harlow (which I relived many years later like the death of Marilyn Monroe, in an era more aware of the neurotic power of every symbol), with lots of comedies in between, the mystery-romances with Myrna Loy and William Powell and the dog Asta, the musicals of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the crime pictures of Chinese detective Charlie Chan and the horror films of Boris Karloff. I didn't remember the names of the directors as well as the names of the actors, except for a few like Frank Capra, Gregory La Cava, and Frank Borzage, who represented the poor rather than the millionaires, usually with Spencer Tracy: they were the good-natured directors from the Roosevelt era; I learned this later; back then I consumed everything without distinguishing between them too much. American cinema in that moment consisted of a collection of actors' faces without equal before or after (at least it seemed that way to me) and the adventures were simple mechanisms to get these faces together (sweethearts, character actors, extras) in different combinations. ~ Italo Calvino

Conservatives came to office to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. But lately we have increased government in order to stay in office. And, soon, if we don't remember why we were elected we will have lost our office along with our principles, and leave a mountain of debt that our children's grandchildren will suffer from long after we have departed this earth. Because, my friends, hypocrisy is the most obvious of sins, and the people will punish it. ~ John McCain

The top quartile, those who did the exercise most rapidly and effectively, work in space that is substantially different from that of the bottom quartile. The top performers' space is quieter, more private, better protected from interruption, and there is more of it. What ~ Tom DeMarco

There it was before her - life. Life: she thought but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private, which she shared neither with her children nor with her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. ~ Virginia Woolf

No nation can approve violence against the most innocent and vulnerable, and expect the effects of that approval to be limited. By 1995, what had seemed a purely private decision in rare circumstances would become a standard method of birth control, an industry, a political litmus test, a rite of passage...a central tenet of a whole culture that centers not around life, its promise and responsibilities, but around self, its creation and cultivation. Those unalienable rights to life and liberty Mr. Jefferson mentioned in the Declaration seem to have been eclipsed by a sad emphasis on the pursuit of happiness. And for all the happiness that the unbridled right to an abortion is supposed to make possible, no political question since slavery seems so heavy with guilt, and its denial. Or else there would be no reason for those who favor abortion to call it something else, "choice" being the most popular euphemism and "reproductive freedom" the most ironic. The signs of this culture of death are now so common that they no longer stand out. In politics and economics, pop culture and art, lifestyle long ago replaced life. ~ Paul Greenberg

She'll get all wooed by some smart, rich, dumbface, handsome, millionaire guy who doesn't care about money but has a lot of it. He'll probably have a private plane that goes to his private island that probably has dolphins. This means that Jen, on top of being happy and smart and pretty and sweet, will most likely get to name and play with...pet dolphins. You can't compete with dolphins. ~ Chad Eastham

We should be alert to oppose the potential significance of the fact that some government officials and public policy advocates are describing the First Amendment guarantee of the "free exercise" of religion as merely "freedom of worship." But the guarantee of "free exercise" protects the right to come out of our private settings, including churches, synagogues and mosques, to act upon our beliefs, subject only to the legitimate government powers necessary to protect public health, safety and welfare. Free exercise surely protects religious citizens in acting upon their beliefs in public policy debates and in votes cast as citizens or as lawmakers. . . .

We must affirm our religious faiths, unite to insist upon our constitutional right to the free exercise of our religions and honor their vital roles in establishing and preserving and prospering this nation. . . .

We are the "salt of the earth." We must retain our savour by living our religion and by asserting ourselves as witnesses of God.

[BYU-I Devotional, Feb. 25, 2014] ~ Dallin H. Oaks

Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silenc ~ Ian McEwan

Of course one never knows about other people's loves, and I would certainly never know about James's. ~ Iris Murdoch

The type of music we know as classical music began with rich people hiring musicians or owning them in a way. Without funding, it's very hard to have this experience. Be it state money or private money, there has to be someone dedicated to raising the money. ~ Gael Garcia Bernal

I'm very, very private; I don't enjoy talking about myself to strangers. Particularly strangers with tapes going. ~ Julie Kavner

Each particular being, in its individuality, its concrete nature and entity, with all its own characteristics and its private qualities and its own inviolable identity, gives glory to God by being precisely what He wants it to be here and now, in the circumstances ordained for it by His Love and His infinite Art. ~ Thomas Merton

If I get any private time in my trailer, all of a sudden I'm doing sit-ups and push-ups. ~ Christina Hendricks

It may well be that a liking for bananas is a merely private matter, though this is in fact questionable. ~ Terry Eagleton

To be the England manager you must win every game, not do anything in your private life and hopefully not earn too much money! ~ Sven-Goran Eriksson

I always feel bad when I meet celebrities and I can just tell every single thing about their personal life, I just say, "Well, they don't have friends. Or a therapist." Once you have both, you don't have to share everything with people, because then you don't have a private life, and then you're, I guess, a workaholic. ~ John Waters

Dad made it to Gold Shield Detective, so he always busted Robin, my oldest brother, and me. Always got caught, whatever we were doing. ~ Kevin Eubanks

A woman went so far as to hire private detectives to contact me to help bring her out of what she called a hypnotic trance. ~ Charley Pride