Patricia Wentworth Quotes

54 Sourced Quotes

Like so many well-meaning people, he was given to doubts when they could no longer serve any useful purpose.

Patricia Wentworth
The fact is, people who don't have any misfortunes are very irritating to their neighbours. No opportunities for popping in with condolences and new-laid eggs. No visits to the afflicted. No opportunities for the milk of human kindness to flow. Naturally it doesn't.

Patricia Wentworth
A lie that is half a truth is ever the hardest to fight.

Patricia Wentworth
Children want one thing at a time, and want that one thing passionately.

Patricia Wentworth
When there is too much to say it is easier to say nothing at all.

Patricia Wentworth
Anyone who pretends not to be interested in money is either a fool or a knave.

Patricia Wentworth
There is a country proverb which says, 'If you don't trouble trouble — trouble won't trouble you.'

Patricia Wentworth
You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.

Patricia Wentworth
Love and a cold cannot be hid. It is, I believe, a Spanish proverb.

Patricia Wentworth
John went up in the world — made a ladder of his brains and climbed.

Patricia Wentworth
Our old nurse used to say, 'If you don't trouble trouble, trouble won't trouble you,' and, 'Let sleeping dogs lie.'

Patricia Wentworth
Being in a rage was rather like being out in a thunderstorm—you couldn't hear yourself think.

Patricia Wentworth
You cannot divide minds into sexes. Each human being presents an individual problem.

Patricia Wentworth
When you've just made the most complete fool of yourself, you feel the need of a specially high horse to ride.

Patricia Wentworth
I do not approve of children being beaten. It is always a confession of failure.

Patricia Wentworth
Once a suggestion has entered the general atmosphere of human thought, it is very difficult to neutralise it.

Patricia Wentworth
There are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation.

Patricia Wentworth
Things you can't understand are always the hardest to bear. To know why is the first step to consolation.

Patricia Wentworth
Tanis was an underminer, but people can't undermine you if you don't let yourself be undermined.

Patricia Wentworth
Take things as they come. Take things as they are. What does it matter? There's one end to everything.

Patricia Wentworth
It is the man who is sure of himself who disregards the opinion of the world. To be sure is to have power.

Patricia Wentworth
He was certainly in the mood in which a man feels that he has been let down, and casts about him for someone to take the blame.

Patricia Wentworth
It's surprising how soon you can get used to having money. It's much easier than getting used to not having it.

Patricia Wentworth
There is and always has been for me a peculiar need to write. This is very different from wanting to be a writer. To be a writer always seemed something so far removed from my talents and abilities and imaginings that it didn't afflict me at all as a notion when I was young. But I was always conscious that I wanted to write.

Patricia Wentworth
He was in tweeds, baggy, hideous, comfortable. Like his curtains and his carpet, they inclined towards mustard in colour — old mustard, dried in the pot — but there was a pink over-check. Altogether one of the more painful examples of a notoriously distressing wardrobe.

Patricia Wentworth
Anger was both a disfiguring and a revealing passion.

Patricia Wentworth
Husbands and wives quarrel a lot more than anyone thinks, and it's oftener about little things than big ones.

Patricia Wentworth
Money's a very serious thing — especially when you haven't got any.

Patricia Wentworth
The words in which these views were expressed were as offensive as conviction and years of practice could make them.

Patricia Wentworth
Mary Stuart wrote, 'My end is in my beginning.' It is easier to agree with her than to decide what is the beginning, and what is the end.

Patricia Wentworth