Quotes from Mary Roberts Rinehart

The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab.

Women are like dogs really. They love like dogs, a little insistently. And they like to fetch and carry and come back wistfully after hard words, and learn rather easily to carry a basket.

Liquor for men and tears for women," he would say. "What would we do without them?

The trouble was that she could not see herself without money, and it seems never to have occurred to her that she could earn it.

Maud Wainwright, a big, irregularly handsome woman, probably fifty and not ashamed of it

I found myself liking her at once. She was as plain as an old shoe. Queer how one can hear of people for years, dislike them on principle, and then meet them and fall for them. I fell for Maud Wainwright that day with a crash—braid, bedroom slippers, and all.

thought, for all her lightness, she was studying me. Not subtly. She was never a subtle woman; but with the semi-direct frankness with which children survey strange people.

in the Beverly Club ballroom I had had my first dancing lessons; Miss Mattie holding up her long, full black taffeta skirt, her neat toes pointing out, and two rows of small boys and girls awkwardly hopping about.

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious crimes

Her eyes filled. "He forgot my birthday, two weeks ago," she said. "It was the first one he had ever forgotten, in nineteen of them." Nineteen! Nineteen from thirty-five leaves sixteen!

waved a smiling good night to me. She looked a lonely figure standing there, under the high white pillars, and I find that I always think of her like that; lonely against the panoply of wealth, kind and totally unarmed against the world.

I stirred my tea angrily.

Yet she [Jane Porter] asks little enough: a quiet life, peace, and if not active happiness, that resignation which after the hot days of youth are over, passes for contentment.

It is characteristic of the average mind often to question what it hears, but to believe wholeheartedly what it reads.

The cuckoo shows melancholia, not madness. Like Byron, he goes about wailing his sad lot, and now and then dropping an egg into someone else's nest.

We broke up for the night about eleven. Mrs. Butler had come down for a while, and had even played a little, something of Tschaikovsky's, a singing, plaintive theme that brought sadness back into Margery's face, and made me think, for no reason, of a wet country road and a plodding, back-burdened peasant.

The world's full of people grieving for somebody they cared about. It's sheer sentimentality to worry about the ones we don't.