Quotes from Josephine Tey

A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes.

The trouble with you, dear, is that you think an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man with a bowler hat.

What had he ever wanted that he could not buy? And if that wasn't riches he didn't know what was.

You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.

In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.

The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.

Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.

Charm. The most insidious weapon in all the human armoury.

The quality of Scotchness was a highly concentrated essence, and should always be diluted. As an ingredient it was admirable; neat, it was as abominable as ammonia.

She would go away deep into the green and white and yellow countryside, and smell the may and lie in the grass and feel the world turning on its axis, and remember that it was a very large world, and that College griefs were mild and bitter but soon over and that in the Scale of Things they were undeniably Very Small Beer.

He is much too personable to be wholesome.

There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in her life for him; but it was a pity, all the same.

When something baffled him he found that if he kept on worrying it, he got no further, and lost his sense of proportion in the process. So when he came to a dead stop he indulged in what he called "shutting his eyes" for a little, and when he "opened" them again he habitually found a new light on things that revealed unexpected angles and made the old problem a totally new proposition. There

Ninety-nine people out of a hundred, receiving a telegram reading /all is discovered: fly/, will snatch a toothbrush and make for the garage. (p. 227 of 300, chapter 19)

Look, Tad, you're quite sure that you have no idea, even in the back of your mind, where Bill could have been staying?" "I haven't got a back to my mind. I have just a small, narrow space in front where I keep all that's useful to me. A few telephone numbers and a prayer or two.

He humped the sack over his shoulder and went on up the path. And Henry, picking up his much smaller bundle, forbore to offer to carry the larger one. To be no longer young, with all the world in front of you, must be bad enough, without having it brought forcibly to your notice.

There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." "You sound constipated," said The Midget.

It would do her good to have some demons to fight, to be swung out in space and held over some bottomless pit now and then.

What happened in 1603?" Grant asked, his mind still on Tyrrel. "We had the Scots tied to our tails for good." "Better than having them at our throats every five minutes.

Bill Maddox reported well of him to the village— "no airs at all and can't be fooled neither; upped with the bonnet and went over her as if he was bred to the trade"—so that by the time he appeared in the Swan with Walter of an evening Salcott St. Mary knew all about him and were prepared to accept him in spite of his reprehensible good looks.

There is a little phrase commonly used in police work that says, "in accordance with the evidence." You say that over six times a day as a grace before and after meals, and perhaps it will keep your feet on the ground and stop you ending up thinking you're Frederick the Great or a hedgehog or something.

The situation, to judge from the first paragraph, had not materially changed since Silas's last book: mother lying-in with her eleventh upstairs, father laid-out after his ninth downstairs, eldest son lying to the Government in the cow-shed, eldest daughter lying with her lover in the hayloft, everyone else lying low in the barn.

The jury, having swallowed at one nauseating gulp the business of viewing the body, had settled into their places with that air of conscious importance and simulated modesty which belongs to those initiated into a mystery.

They're rather sweet together. In some ways they are more like twins than lovers. They have that utter trust in each other; that dependence on the other half to make a proper whole.