Quotes from Margery Allingham

patched red and white

When Uncle Hubert spoke of a fellow human being as poor, he meant to convey that either by accident or intention they had done something wrong.

THE country round the Mill at Pontisbright at five o'clock on a June morning was of itself a spell. The near distance was dizzy with haze, the dew beads were thick on the grass, the waters were limpid and ringing, the birds sang with idiotic abandon, the air was scented with animals and a thousand flowers.

Truth is such a naked lady," Mr. Campion spoke softly. "Apparently in well-regulated country families no one is so indelicate as to stare at all of her at once.

Jolly sensible of you. There always is a moment when one makes up one's mind about these things, and then it's much tidier to act at once.

She rose and followed her bust from the room.

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.

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.

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

Albert Campion: 'I'm serious!' Lugg: 'That's unhealthy in itself.

It was a little skirmish across a century.

He used to be a burglar, you know. It's the old story – lost his figure. As he says himself, it cramps your style when your only means of exit are the double doors in the front hall.

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.

Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world.

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.

Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close.

Beware of anger. It is the most difficult to remove of all the hindrances. But it is the alcohol of the body, you know, and the devil of it is that it deadens the perceptions.

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.

Women are terribly shocking to men, my dear. Don't understand them. Like them. It saves such a lot of hurting one way and the other.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.

Mourning is not forgetting,' he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. 'It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.

His name is Albert Campion," she said. "He came down in Anne Edgeware's car and the first thing he did when he introduced himself was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed penny—he's quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.

In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade

THE main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story. This adventure is mine, Albert Campion's, and I am fairly certain that I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg killed that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it.