Margery Allingham Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable...

Margery Allingham
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.

Margery Allingham
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?

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

Margery Allingham
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 knot.

Margery Allingham
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.

Margery Allingham
Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can find it in shreds of cloth, in the interstices of floor boards, on the iron of a heel, and can measure it and swear to it and weave it into a rope to hang a man.

Margery Allingham
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. Which being translated means: I guessed it.

Margery Allingham
It's some damned innocent. Some little head so full of wool it doesn't know it's bleating.

Margery Allingham
Mrs. Gollie came into Luke's office as if she was hastening to the scene of some terrible personal disaster, or perhaps merely going on the stage.

Margery Allingham
There are only two kinds of men who become dentists. The ones who love it and ones who get miserable. Think round and you'll see I'm right.

Margery Allingham
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.

Margery Allingham
It's pitch, sex is. Once you touch it, it clings to you.

Margery Allingham
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.

Margery Allingham
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.

Margery Allingham
Telling the truth is the basis of all classic art.

Margery Allingham
Few people can see God, and it seems an even bolder mind to see the Devil. Active evil is more incomprehensible than active good, and so it ought to be.

Margery Allingham
She had one of those high-pitched apologetic voices which seemed to make every pronouncement sound like a spirit message, inconclusive but faintly ominous.

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 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.

Margery Allingham
You bore me... 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.

Margery Allingham
There was nobody who could talk so well to people they didn't know. The first half-hour you were with him made you think you'd discovered something, but all the other half-hours were a disillusionment.

Margery Allingham
There is something very good in pride of race if you can be satisfied in your heart it is absolutely genuine and is based on things you have see, heard and felt rather than on those you have read.

Margery Allingham
Courage is not herself enough. She cannot stand alone. She is a part, not a whole, a wife, not a man and wife. A well appreciated helpmeet.

Margery Allingham
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.

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

Margery Allingham