Quotes from Margery Allingham

As I see it, the word "private" is going plumb out of date. It's goin' to be an ole-fashioned concep', mark my words. That's a prophecy.

Waiting is one of the great arts.

Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.

Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth.

Infatuation is one of those slightly comic illnesses which are at once so undignified and so painful that a nice-minded world does its best to ignore their existence altogether, referring to them only under provocation and then with apology, but, like its more material brother, this boil on the neck of the spirit can hardly be forgotten either by the sufferer or anyone else in his vicinity. The malady is ludicrous, sad, excruciating and, above all, instantly diagnosable.

George Abbershaw's prosaic mind quivered on the verge of poetry when he looked at her.

I always understood that the idea of education was to get one's mind as sharp as it will come before the party starts. Once the heart gets going you need all the wits you've got, my goodness.

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?