Mary Roberts Rinehart Quotes

Natalie Spenser was giving a dinner. She was not an easy hostess.

The greatest weapon in the world ... is ridicule.

I always said there were plenty of things going on here, right under our noses, that we couldn't see," she said, holding out her apron.

"I don't see with my nose," I remarked. "What have you got there?

Every writer knows the terror of an unexpected success. How to carry on? How to repeat it?

I had a vision ... of being found on the pavement by some passerby, with a small punctuation mark ending my sentence of life.

Curious, how one remembered Christmas. Perhaps because other days might appeal to the head, but this one appealed to the heart.

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust.

required less personal supervision, and as they both got their

All lives are so divided: a step back; a plunge; and then, in desperation and despair, a little climb up God's ladder.

The one pleasure that never palls is the pleasure of not going to church.

It was said of Miss Letitia that when money came into her possession it went out of circulation.

Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.

Great loves were almost always great tragedies. Perhaps it was because love was never truly great until the element of sacrifice entered into it.

Pretense is the oil that lubricates society.

It's been my experience that the first few days of married life women are blind because they want to be and after that because they have to be.

What a tragedy it was that the only thing age could offer to youth was its own experience, and that the experiences of others were never profitable.

I began to feel that if religion was either an illusion or a revelation, it was simpler to accept it as an illusion.

These are times of action. Men think and then act; sometimes, indeed, they simply act.

McKnight is gradually taking over the criminal end of the business.

Girls inevitably grew into women, but something of the boy persisted in every man.

Oh, stop talking," I cried, in a hunted tone. "I can't bear it. If you are going to arrest me, get it over."

"I'd rather NOT arrest you, if we can find a way out. You look so young, so new to Crime! Even your excuse for being here is so naive, that I - won't you tell me why you wrote a love letter, if you are not in love? And whom you sent it to? That's important, you see, as it bears on the case. I intend," he said, "to be judgdicial[sic], unimpassioned, and quite fair."

"I wrote a love letter" I explained, feeling rather cheered, "but it was not intended for any one, Do you see? It was just a love letter."

"Oh," he said. "Of course. It is often done. And after that?"

"Well, it had to go somewhere. At least I felt that way about it. So I made up a name from some malted milk tablets - - "

"Malted milk tablets!" he said, looking bewildered.

"Just as I was thinking up a name to send it to," I explained, "Hannah - that's mother's maid, you know - brought in some hot milk and some malted milk tablets, and I took the name from them."

"Look here," he said, "I'm unpredjudiced and quite calm, but isn't the `mother's maid' rather piling it on?"

"Hannah is mother's maid, and she brought in the milk and the tablets, I should think," I said, growing sarcastic, "that so far it is clear to the dullest mind."

"Go on," he said, leaning back and closing his eyes. "You named the letter

...at last she drew on her gloves, straightened her hat, and went away with that odd self-possession which seems to characterize all the older women of the Crescent. Time takes its toll of them, death and tragedy come inevitably, but they face the world with quiet faces and unbroken dignity.

[On the Irish:] Strange race ... Don't know what they want, but want it like the devil.

War is a thing of fearful and curious anomalies ... It has shown that government by men only is not an appeal to reason, but an appeal to arms; that on women, without a voice to protest, must fall the burden. It is easier to die than to send a son to death.

[I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!

I suppose there is something in all of us that harks back to the soil. When you come to think of it, what are picnics but outcroppings of instinct? No one really enjoys them or expects to enjoy them, but with the first warm days some prehistoric instinct takes us out into the woods, to fry potatoes over a strangling wood fire or spend the next week getting grass stains out of our clothes. It must be instinct; every atom of intelligence warns us to stay at home near the refrigerator.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

War is not two great armies meeting in the clash and frenzy of battle. War is a boy being carried on a stretcher, looking up at God's blue sky with bewildered eyes that are soon to close; war is a woman carrying a child that has been injured by a shell; war is spirited horses tied in burning buildings and waiting for death; war is the flower of a race, battered, hungry, bleeding, up to its knees in filthy water; war is an old woman burning a candle before the Mater Dolorsa for the son she has given.

Providence has a curious way of letting two lives run along, each apparently independent of the other. Parallel lines they seem, hopeless of meeting. Converging lines really, destined, through long ages, by every deed that has been done to meet as a certain point and there fuse.

A cat and a Bible, and nobody needs to be lonely.

Politics is still the man's game. The women are allowed to do the chores, the dirty work, and now and then
but only occasionally
one is present at some secret conference or other. But it's not the rule. They can go out and get the vote, if they can and will; they can collect money, they can be grateful for being permitted to work. But that is all.

When knowledge comes in at the door, fear and superstition fly out of the window.

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

There is no place in the world, I imagine, for a philosopher with a sense of humor, a new leisure, and an inquiring turn of mind!

We are often miserable at our desk or typewriters, but not happy away from them.

It takes a good many years and some pretty hard knocks to make people tolerant.

There are only two things to be done when a general is angry: One is to get behind the furniture and pretend one is not there; the other is to distract his mind.

The only way to make a husband over according to one's ideas ... would be to adopt him at an early age, say four.

My crime books are actually novels and are written as such. One might even say that each one is really two novels, one of which is the story I tell the reader, and the other the buried story I know and let slip now and then into a clue to whet the reader's interest.

The world doesn't come to the clever folks, it comes to the stubborn, obstinate, one-idea-at-a-time people.

Useless as a pulled tooth.

It is only in his head that man is heroic; in the pit of his stomach he is always a coward.

I have a great deal of mind. It takes a long time to change it.

[On fishing:] Greatest rest in the world for the brain.

She had the theory of youth about love, that it was a violent thing, tempestuous and passionate. She thought that love demanded, not knowing that love gives first, and then asks.

Conflict is the very essence of life.

There are lies and lies. Now and then the Great Recorder must put one on the credit side of the balance, one that has saved intolerable suffering, or has made well and happy a sick soul.

Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral.

Death was a beginning and not an end; it was the morning of the spirit. Tired bodies lay down to sleep and their souls wakened to the morning, rested; the first fruits of them that slept.

I never saw a lawyer yet who would admit he was making money.

Some day some one will write a book about that frantic search of the creative worker for silence and freedom, not only from interruption but from the fear of interruption.

In my criminal work anything that wears skirts is a lady, until the law proves her otherwise. From the frayed and slovenly petticoats of the woman who owns a poultry stand in the market and who has grown wealthy by selling chickens at twelve ounces to the pound, or the silk sweep of Mamie Tracy, whose diamonds have been stolen down on the avenue...

If one can remember without loving, then couldn't one love without remembering?

The calm of a place like Bellwood is the peace of death without the hope of resurrection.

From class consciousness to class hatred was but a step.

My family, although it keeps its hair, turns gray early - a business asset but a social handicap.

I suppose that we are only young, Chris, so long as we can forget. After that we merely remember!

Men were not equal in the effort they made, nor did equal efforts bring equal result ... Equality of opportunity, yes. Equality of effort and result, no.

A little work, a little sleep, a little love and it's all over.

The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for most of us but one setting.

The mystery story is two stories in one: the story of what happened and the story of what appeared to happen.

[To her frequently needed plumber:] How would you like to be adopted? I'm sure it would be cheaper.

Peace is not a passive but an active condition, not a negation but an affirmation.

Young Doctor Arden was gong through the process of reorienting himself after a night's sleep.

When a great burden is lifted, the relief is not always felt at once. The galled places still ache.

There is a sort of melancholy pleasure to be had out of a funeral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I shrank from a death-bed.

To the bottle! In infancy, the milk bottle; in our prime, the wine bottle; in our dotage, the pill bottle.

Well, that was life. It was an old tree, and the old passed on. Probably they did not mind. There came a time when all sap ran slowly, and the peace of age with all things behind it merged easily into the peace of death. The difficult thing was to be young.

The author lives with one foot in an everyday world and the other feeling about anxiously for a foothold in another more precarious one.

There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it becomes an obsession, like hunger.

I have never learned to say 'gas' for gasoline. It seems to me as absurd as if I were to say 'but' for butter.