Margery Allingham
9 quotes
Biography
Margery Louise Allingham was an English novelist from the "Golden Age of Detective Fiction", and considered one of its four "Queens of Crime", alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh.
"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."
"Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear."
"'A quotation's only a short neat way of sayin' somethin' everybody knows, like "It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide."' (Italics in original)"
"I am one of those people who are blessed ... with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it."
"However carefully a judge is protected by the experience and the logic of the law, there must be times -not many, I know, or we should have no judges- when the same frightful question must be answered. Not faced, you see, but answered. Every now and again he must have to say to himself, in effect, "Everyone agrees that this colour is black, and my reason tells me it is so, but on my soul, do I know?"
"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."
"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."
"The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable."
"Waiting is one of the great arts."