Margery Allingham Quotes
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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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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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The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
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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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What attracted me the most of all to the detective story, was the protective covering offered to the author.
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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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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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People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.
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It was a little skirmish across a century.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Waiting is one of the great arts.