Quotes by 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 bee...”

“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 o...”

“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. W...”

“There are some people to whom muddled thinking and self-deception are the two most unforgivable crimes in the world.”

“There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.”

“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 ...”

“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 answe...”

“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.”

“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.”

“The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.”

“I am one of those people who are blessed ... with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.”

“Waiting is one of the great arts.”

“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.”

“Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear.”

“'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)”

“What attracted me the most of all to the detective story, was the protective covering offered to the author.”

“Telling the truth is the basis of all classic art.”

“To be free takes a lot of time and trouble.”

“As a nation, we English will fight and die for principles we cannot find time to teach in our free schools.”

“We, me and thee and the parson and all the other lads in the village constitute the public, and the politicians are our servants.”