MARGERY ALLINGHAM

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.

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?

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.

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.

Love so seldom means happiness.

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.

It was a little skirmish across a century.

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.

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

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

She rose and followed her bust from the room.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

People don't alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.

Waiting is one of the great arts.