Margaret Millar Quotes

I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking's easy. It's not thinking that's hard.

The sun was shining like a congratulation.

Private problems don't constitute an excuse for bad manners.

Don't borrow trouble. The interest is too high.

Common sense is a vastly overrated virtue. I myself prefer the spark of genius.

You can't drown your troubles ... because troubles can swim.

Any good marriage involves a certain amount of play-acting.

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

That's what a conscience is made of, scar tissue ... Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.

Perfect young men don't get murdered, they don't even get born.

Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

Violence is the instinctive response to fear.

The sidewalks swarmed with people, the night was full of the noises of the living. They struck Miss Clarvoe's ears strangely, like sounds from another planet.

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information.

The day will probably come when you can tell everything about a person from his dreams except his age and weight.

There is no such thing as an ex-exhibitionist.

You have a low opinion of yourself, Helen."
"I wasn't born with it."
"Where did you get it?"
'The story" she said, "is too long to tell, and too dull to listen to.

The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.

Shrews are made, not born.

The rest of us have monsters too, but we must call them by other names, or pretend they don't exist...

Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.

When you're counting alibis and not apples, one plus one equals none.

Animosity hung between them like a two-edged sword; neither of them could use it without first getting hurt herself.

I've reached the age where anyone who lets me talk seems like an old By listening to my memories, you have become part of them.

I didn't mind giving up carnality, jewelry and red meat in return for comradeship and an afterlife.