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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Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear.
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Of all the band of personal traitors the sense of humor is the most dangerous.
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Love so seldom means happiness.
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The relationship between the two men was something of a miracle in itself. It was a cordiality based, apparently, on complete non-comprehension cemented by a deep mutual respect for the utterly unknown. No two men saw less eye to eye and the result was unexpected harmony, as if a dog and a fish had mysteriously become friends and were proud each of the other's remarkable dissimilarity to himself.
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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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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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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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The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
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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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Only the united beat of sex and heart can create ecstasy.
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She rose and followed her bust from the room.
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A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it's my only superstition.
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There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.
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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.
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Good doctors get a mechanic's pleasure in making you tick over.
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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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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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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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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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Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can find it in shreds of cloth, in the interstices of floor boards, on the iron of a heel, and can measure it and swear to it and weave it into a rope to hang a man.
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One policeman may be a friend, but two are the Law.
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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.