Margery Allingham

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.

— Margery Allingham

“Up the well known creek”

— Margery Allingham

It was a little skirmish across a century.

— Margery Allingham

Waiting is one of the great arts.

— Margery Allingham

Love so seldom means happiness.

— Margery Allingham

She rose and followed her bust from the room.

— Margery Allingham

Only the united beat of sex and heart can create ecstasy.

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

the old fellow seemed to spot deceit as if it reeked like a goat.

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

There are only two kinds of men who become dentists. The ones who love it and ones who get miserable. Think round…

— Margery Allingham

“Meanwhile Crumb Street, never a place of beauty, that afternoon was at its worst. The fog slopped over its low houses like…

— Margery Allingham

I am one of those people who are blessed, or cursed, with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a…

— Margery Allingham

Self-satisfaction is the state of mind of those who have the happy conviction that they are not as other men.

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the…

— 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“As I see it, the word "private" is going plumb out of date.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…

— Margery Allingham

the relationship between the two men was something of a miracle in itself. It was a cordiality based, apparently, on complete non-comprehension…

— Margery Allingham

Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and…

— Margery Allingham

He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of…

— Margery Allingham

But there are roughly two sorts of informed people, aren't there? People who start off right by observing the pitfalls and mistakes…

— Margery Allingham

The nicest people fall in love indiscriminately ... while under the influence of that pre-eminently selfish lunacy they may make the most…

— Margery Allingham

It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its…

— Margery Allingham

“THE main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil…

— Margery Allingham

The process of elimination, combined with a modicum of common sense, will always assist us to arrive at the correct conclusion with…

— Margery Allingham

“Well, you know, it's an evil thing, this attempt to reverse the process of mourning.' The Canon stepped back on to his…

— Margery Allingham

Infatuation is one of those slightly comic illnesses which are at once so undignified and so painful that a nice-minded world does…

— Margery Allingham

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing…

— Margery Allingham

One policeman may be a friend, but two are the Law.

— Margery Allingham

Of all the band of personal traitors the sense of humor is the most dangerous.

— Margery Allingham

Good doctors get a mechanic's pleasure in making you tick over.

— Margery Allingham

A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it's my only superstition.

— Margery Allingham

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…

— Margery Allingham

“This is not even the stuff dictators are made of, but this is the kind of madness which is often not found…

— Margery Allingham

When one kicks over a tea table and smashes everything but the sugar bowl, one may as well pick that up and…

— Margery Allingham