Margery Allingham Quotes

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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

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

Love so seldom means happiness.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

It was a little skirmish across a century.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?