Margery Allingham Quotes & Sayings

Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage. — Margery Allingham

Weal on his face. 'I'm inclined to agree with you,' he — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade, — Margery Allingham

Albert Campion: 'I'm serious!'
Lugg: 'That's unhealthy in itself. — Margery Allingham

Women are terribly shocking to men, my dear. Don't understand them. Like them. It saves such a lot of hurting one way and the other. — Margery Allingham

However carefully a judge is protected by the experience and the logic of the law, there must be times -not many, I know, or we should have no judges- when the same frightful question must be answered. Not faced, you see, but answered. Every now and again he must have to say to himself, in effect, Everyone agrees that this colour is black, and my reason tells me it is so, but on my soul, do I know? — Margery Allingham

It's pitch, sex is. Once you touch it, it clings to you. — Margery Allingham

Love so seldom means happiness. — Margery Allingham

Meanwhile Crumb Street, never a place of beauty, that afternoon was at its worst. The fog slopped over its low houses like a bucketful of cold soup over a row of dirty stoves. The — Margery Allingham

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change. — Margery Allingham

Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

as might have been expected, in the dinner-jacket he had worn on the previous evening. His explanation was characteristic. 'Most extraordinary,' he said, in his slightly high-pitched voice. — Margery Allingham

Only the most pleasant characters in this book are portraits of living people and the events here recorded unfortunately never took place. — Margery Allingham

One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

This estate is called a Phoenix. It's not a municipal venture, it's a social rebirth, a statement of a sincere belief that decent conditions make a decent community, and I'm — Margery Allingham

All about him stretched the lush green countryside in which there were to every acre a thousand hiding-places, deep and wide and quiet enough to hold so small and worthless a thing as a single unit of mortal clay. I — Margery Allingham

There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder. — Margery Allingham

No.' He spoke with a tenderness unexpected in him. 'No, lady, no. Put that clean out of your mind. That dear chap and his dog have gone, gone where the dear chaps do go, gone with a few I knew. You've got your own life and you go and live it and make a do of it, as no doubt he'd like you to. Now — Margery Allingham

The old fellow seemed to spot deceit as if it reeked like a goat. — Margery Allingham

Up the well known creek — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

There were at least four people who realized that Inspector Stanislaus Oates, only lately promoted to the Big Five, was being followed down High Holborn by the short, squat, shabby man who yet bore the elusive air of a forgotten culture about him. — Margery Allingham

Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

Of all the band of personal traitors the sense of humor is the most dangerous. — Margery Allingham

Self-satisfaction is the state of mind of those who have the happy conviction that they are not as other men. — Margery Allingham

A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it's my only superstition. — Margery Allingham

Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can weave it into a rope to hang a man. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

If one cannot command attention by one's admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

She rose and followed her bust from the room. — Margery Allingham

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable. — Margery Allingham

Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth. — Margery Allingham

One policeman may be a friend, but two are the Law. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

It was a little skirmish across a century. — Margery Allingham

Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world. — Margery Allingham

Miss Huntingforest beamed at them. 'If you can eat cakes at eleven o'clock in the morning you're all right,' she said. 'It's an acid test, in my opinion. If a man can eat two cookies before noon and enjoy them there's not much wrong with him. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

As I see it, the word "private" is going plumb out of date. It's goin' to be an ole-fashioned concep', mark my words. That's a prophecy. — Margery Allingham

This is not even the stuff dictators are made of, but this is the kind of madness which is often not found out until it is too late.' Campion — Margery Allingham

Good doctors get a mechanic's pleasure in making you tick over. — Margery Allingham

Well, you know, it's an evil thing, this attempt to reverse the process of mourning.' The Canon stepped back on to his own territory and became a different being. 'Mourning is not forgetting,' he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. 'It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous. This attempt to reverse it when the thing is practically achieved, that is wicked, an attempt to kill the spirit. The — Margery Allingham

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. — Margery Allingham

Waiting is one of the great arts. — Margery Allingham

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? — Margery Allingham