Quotes from Margery Allingham

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.

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.

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.

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

When one kicks over a tea table and smashes everything but the sugar bowl, one may as well pick that up and drop it on the bricks, don't you think?

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

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.

I am one of those people who are blessed, or cursed, with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.

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.

Waiting is one of the great arts.

It's crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.

It's pitch, sex is. Once you touch it, it clings to you.

Once sex rears its ugly 'ead it's time to steer clear.

We chatted for some moments, and Janet joined us, and it was not until some minutes later that I became aware of someone hating me. It is one of those odd but unmistakable sensations one experiences Sometimes on buses or at private dinners, and I looked across the table to observe a young cleric whom I had never seen before regarding me with honest hostility.

A faintly puzzled expression, if the term is not too specific, passed a leisurely way over Mr. Whippet's indeterminate features.

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

The fat man, taken by surprise, was very hurt. "Search me, Missus." "I might if I had the time. Her bright eyes, small and dark as his own, took in his great bulk with wicked amusement. "What are you carrying about with you? The dome of St Paul's?" "Ho! Who's talking, eh?" As the insult went home he forgot all caution. "Margot Fonteyn of the Convent Garden I suppose.

The whole house seemed to be permeated by the scent of the herb garden.

The October wind, which had promised rain all day, hesitated in its reckless flight down the moist pavements to hurl a handful of fine drops at the windows of the drawing room in the big Hampstead house. The sound was sharp and spiteful, so that the silence between the two women within became momentarily shocked, as if it had received some gratuitous, if trivial, insult.

In those days she had been a sly-eyed little party, much younger than the crowd which had grown up with Minnie, but she had strung along with them and, when Jake Bernadine's first wife had given up in despair, had married and mothered him, enjoyed his strange pictures, and had children by him. Just

She was a mighty woman, tall as he was, and built on aggressive lines, like a battleship, with a square squat head to which the iron-grey hair was bound as tight as possible in an intricate mystery of tiny plaits. He

He asked so little of life that its frugal bounty amazed and delighted him.

A treed cat, a man in love, and the French. God help the fool who tries to rescue any one of them.

fussiness, and his