Margery Allingham Quotes
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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.
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If one cannot command attention by one's admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance
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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.
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Good doctors get a mechanic's pleasure in making you tick over.
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It's easy enough to make the truth look silly. A man never seems more foolish-like than he does when he's speaking his whole mind and heart.
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People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.
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I write every paragraph four times - once to get my meaning down, once to put in anything I have left out, once to take out anything that seems unnecessary, and once to make the whole thing sound as if I had only just thought of it.
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the relationship between the two men was something of a miracle in itself. It was a cordiality based, apparently, on complete non-comprehension cemented by a deep mutual respect for the utterly unknown. No two men saw less eye to eye and the result was unexpected harmony, as if a dog and a fish had mysteriously become friends and were proud each of the other's remarkable dissimilarity to himself.
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It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.
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The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most outrageous demands upon their friends with no other excuse than their painful need.
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Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions.
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Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can weave it into a rope to hang a man.
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It's pitch, sex is. Once you touch it, it clings to you.
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the old fellow seemed to spot deceit as if it reeked like a goat.
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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
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A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it's my only superstition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Only the united beat of sex and heart can create ecstasy.
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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.
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There are only two kinds of men who become dentists. The ones who love it and ones who get miserable. Think round and you'll see I'm right.
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She rose and followed her bust from the room.
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Love so seldom means happiness.
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The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.
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Of all the band of personal traitors the sense of humor is the most dangerous.
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Self-satisfaction is the state of mind of those who have the happy conviction that they are not as other men.
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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.
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