Margery Allingham > Quotes

“She rose and followed her bust from the room.”
― 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, Look to the Lady

“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.”
― Margery Allingham

“There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder.”
― Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost

“Albert Campion: 'I’m serious!'
Lugg: 'That’s unhealthy in itself.”
― Margery Allingham, Mystery Mile

“It was a little skirmish across a century.”
― Margery Allingham, Black Plumes

“He used to be a burglar, you know. It’s the old story – lost his figure. As he says himself, it cramps your style when your only means of exit are the double doors in the front hall.”
― Margery Allingham, Police at the Funeral

“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, Dancers in Mourning

“Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world.”
― Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke

“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, Dancers in Mourning

“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.”
― Margery Allingham

“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.”
― Margery Allingham, Black Plumes

“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, The Fashion in Shrouds

“Women are terribly shocking to men, my dear. Don't understand them. Like them. It saves such a lot of hurting one way and the other.”
― Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

“In common with most writers, he had evolved his own technique for making bearable the drudgery of his abominable trade,”
― Margery Allingham, The Tiger In The Smoke

“Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close.”
― Margery Allingham, Police at the Funeral

“His name is Albert Campion," she said. "He came down in Anne Edgeware's car and the first thing he did when he introduced himself was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed penny—he's quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.”
― Margery Allingham, The Black Dudley Murder

“Waiting is one of the great arts.”
― Margery Allingham, The Tiger In The Smoke

“As they entered, a wire-haired fox terrier of irreproachable breeding, rose from the
hearth-rug and came to meet them with leisurely dignity. Marcus effected an introduction hastily.

‘Foon,’ he said. ‘Written “Featherstonehaugh”.’

Somewhat to his host’s embarrassment Mr Campion shook hands with the dog, who seemed to appreciate the courtesy, for he followed them back to the hearth-rug, waiting for them to be seated before he took up his position on the rug again, where he sat during the rest of the proceedings with the same air of conscious breeding which characterized his master.”
― Margery Allingham, Police at the Funeral

“Mourning is not forgetting,’ he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. ‘It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.”
― Margery Allingham, The Tiger In The Smoke

“THE main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story. This adventure is mine, Albert Campion's, and I am fairly certain that I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg killed that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it.”
― Margery Allingham, Flowers for the Judge, Death of a Ghost, and The Case of the Late Pig

“Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth.”
― Margery Allingham, The Case of the Late Pig

“We chatted for some moments, and Janet joined us, and it was not until some minutes later that I became aware of someone hating me.

It is one of those odd but unmistakable sensations one experiences Sometimes on buses or at private dinners, and I looked across the table to observe a young cleric whom I had never seen before regarding me with honest hostility.”
― Margery Allingham, The Case of the Late Pig

“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.”
― Margery Allingham, Hide My Eyes: A Gripping Mystery Set in London's West End

“Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.”
― Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke

“which had drawn a world of rank and fashion still in stocks and beavers, 39 Sallet Square had been The Gallery and so it was still, with a history of wealth and prestige behind it unequalled in Europe. “Well?” The old woman was persistent. “How is he behaving?” Frances hesitated. “He and Phillida are staying with me at 38, you know,” she began cautiously. “It was Meyrick’s idea. He wanted Robert to be near.” Mrs. Ivory’s narrow lips curled. The mention of the house next door to The Gallery, where she had reigned throughout her career from its heyday in the seventies right up to the fin de siecle, always stirred her. “So Phillida’s at 38, is she?” she said. “Meyrick didn’t tell me that. You’re finding it difficult to live with her, I suppose? I don’t blame you. I could never abide a fool in the house even when it was a man. A silly woman is quite insufferable. What has she done now?” “No, it’s not Phillida,” said Frances slowly. “No, darling, I only wish it were.” She turned away and glanced out across the room to the barren trees far over the heath. There was a great deal more to worry”
― Margery Allingham, Black Plumes

“George Abbershaw's prosaic mind quivered on the verge of poetry when he looked at her.”
― Margery Allingham, The Crime at Black Dudley

“When Uncle Hubert spoke of a fellow human being as poor, he meant to convey that either by accident or intention they had done something wrong.”
― Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke

“as an almost legendary figure. To his child she had always been presented as the beloved beauty of a golden age, a link with the great Victorians, a creature larger than life in power and importance, so that all through these last perturbing weeks Frances had comforted herself with the recollection that if the worse came to the worst, even though Meyrick himself was half across the world, there was always Gabrielle up at Hampstead. It was hard to realise now that the moment of appeal had come, that she was”
― Margery Allingham, Black Plumes

“Truth is such a naked lady," Mr. Campion spoke softly. "Apparently in well-regulated country families no one is so indelicate as to stare at all of her at once.”
― Margery Allingham, The Beckoning Lady