Margery Allingham Quotes

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.

~ 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 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.

~ Margery Allingham

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.

~ Margery Allingham

There are some people to whom muddled thinking and self-deception are the two most unforgivable crimes in the world.

~ Margery Allingham

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

~ Margery Allingham

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.

~ Margery Allingham

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.

~ Margery Allingham

Waiting is one of the great arts.

~ Margery Allingham