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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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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The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
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Only the united beat of sex and heart can create ecstasy.
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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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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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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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People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.
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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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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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It's pitch, sex is. Once you touch it, it clings to you.
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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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Waiting is one of the great arts.