Margery Allingham Quotes
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'A quotation's only a short neat way of sayin' somethin' everybody knows, like 'It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.'' (Italics in original)
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Of all the band of personal traitors the sense of humor is the most dangerous.
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Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear.
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Love so seldom means happiness.
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Beware of anger. It is the most difficult to remove of all the hindrances. But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions.
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The old fellow seemed to spot deceit as if it reeked like a goat.
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The process of elimination, combined with a modicum of common sense, will always assist us to arrive at the correct conclusion with the maximum of possible accuracy and the minimum of hard labor. Which being translated means: I guessed it.
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Infatuation is one of those slightly comic illnesses which are at once so undignified and so painful that a nice-minded world does its best to ignore their existence altogether, referring to them only under provocation and then with apology, but, like its more material brother, this boil on the neck of the spirit can hardly be forgotten either by the sufferer or anyone else in his vicinity. The malady is ludicrous, sad, excruciating and, above all, instantly diagnosable.
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There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.
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When one kicks over a tea table and smashes everything but the sugar bowl, one may as well pick that up and drop it on the bricks, don't you think?
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A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it's my only superstition.
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There are only two kinds of men who become dentists. The ones who love it and ones who get miserable. Think round and you'll see I'm right.
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Mourning is not forgetting... It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the dust.
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Good doctors get a mechanic's pleasure in making you tick over.
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But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes and going round them, and the people who fall into them and get out and know they're there because of that. They both come to the same conclusions but they don't have quite the same point of view.
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It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.
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He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.
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One policeman may be a friend, but two are the Law.
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She rose and followed her bust from the room.
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It's easy enough to make the truth look silly. A man never seems more foolish-like than he does when he's speaking his whole mind and heart.
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When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.
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Once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I have only just thought of it.
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If one cannot command attention by one's admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance.
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The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.