Margery Allingham Quotes
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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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The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
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Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and honestly charming again a few years later still is one of those things which are not satisfactorily to be explained and are therefore jolly and exciting and an addition to the perennial interest of life.
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Self-satisfaction is the state of mind of those who have the happy conviction that they are not as other men.
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I am one of those people who are blessed, or cursed, with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.
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Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can weave it into a rope to hang a man.
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What attracted me the most of all to the detective story, was the protective covering offered to the author.
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When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion, that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.
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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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People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.
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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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It was a little skirmish across a century.
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It's pitch, sex is. Once you touch it, it clings to you.
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I write every paragraph four times - 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 had only just thought of it.
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I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.
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Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions.
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A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.
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Waiting is one of the great arts.