Margery Allingham Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

In common with many other people he cherished the secret conviction that a celebrity should look peculiar, at the very least, and had hitherto been happy to note that a great number did.

Margery Allingham
The unity of instinct and the universal belief in freedom for the individual which id the backbone of democracy is a very real thing in Britain today. We are not only fighting for it, it is our greatest weapon.

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

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

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

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

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

Margery Allingham
He was a vast red man with untidy hair, prominent eyes, and a loud voice. The state of his clothes suggested that he'd been dragged by the heels through some major disaster.

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

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

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

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

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

Margery Allingham
The pavements looked washed and sticky, like pieces of half-sucked toffee.

Margery Allingham
What a period. What an age to have been alive in. Oh thank God I was born when I was.

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

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
Rhoda is the kind of woman who digs up the mint outside her kitchen door two days after she has planted it, to find out if it has started to grow.

Margery Allingham
He was resigned and on the whole patient, like a man with a very old illness.

Margery Allingham
Mayo was anxious to leave and like so many enthusiasts seemed liable to turn a social escape into a jail break if anything threatened to hinder him.

Margery Allingham
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