Margery Allingham Quotes

• 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 dust.

  Margery Allingham

  Sad, Dust, Ties

  51 Copy quote

• 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.

  Margery Allingham

  Writing, Sound, Four

  18 Copy quote

• Waiting is one of the great arts.

  Margery Allingham

  Art, Waiting, Self Control

  Margery Allingham (2015). “The Tiger in the Smoke”, p.35, Ipso Books

  31 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Change, People, May

  Margery Allingham (2013). “No Love Lost”, p.103, Bloomsbury Publishing

  14 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Quality, Nuisance, Attention

  16 Copy quote

• Love so seldom means happiness.

  Margery Allingham

  Mean

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

  16 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Humor, Band, Traitor

  13 Copy quote

• The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.

  Margery Allingham

  Optimism, Healthy, Mind

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

  7 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Law, Two, May

  Margery Allingham (1969). “The Allingham Case-book”

  11 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Doctors, Tick, Pleasure

  14 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Anger, Doe, Emotion

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Falling In Love, Selfish, People

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Margery Allingham

  Mother, Children, Believe

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Mean, Common Sense, Elimination

  Margery Allingham (1961). “Three Cases for Mr. Campion”

  9 Copy quote

• 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.

  Margery Allingham

  Mistake, Fall, Views

  Margery Allingham (2015). “Dancers in Mourning”, p.31, Ipso Books

  12 Copy quote

• 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.

  Margery Allingham

  Brother, Nice, Apology

  Margery Allingham (1961). “Three Cases for Mr. Campion”

  14 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  People, Murder

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

  10 Copy quote

• Only the united beat of sex and heart can create ecstasy.

  Margery Allingham

  Sex, Heart, Beats

  9 Copy quote

• 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

  Years, Ridiculous, Charming

  Margery Allingham (1961). “Three Cases for Mr. Campion”

  11 Copy quote

• 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

  Lying, Writing, Eight

  Margery Allingham (1959). “Crime and Mr. Campion”

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Dog, Eye, Men

  Margery Allingham (2015). “The Tiger in the Smoke”, p.26, Ipso Books

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Men, Two

  9 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Deception, Deceit, Goats

  Margery Allingham (2015). “The Tiger in the Smoke”, p.85, Ipso Books

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Two, Intuition, Quiet

  Margery Allingham (2016). “Margery Allingham Box Set 2: Flowers for the Judge, Death of a Ghost, and The Case of the Late Pig”, p.120, Ipso Books

  8 Copy quote

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

  Margery Allingham

  Men, High Heels, Blood

  Margery Allingham (2015). “The Tiger in the Smoke”, p.113, Ipso Books

  8 Copy quote

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