Top 35 Margery Allingham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Waiting is one of the great arts.”

— Margery Allingham

Featured in: Self Control Quotes

2. “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.”

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

4. “The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.”

— Margery Allingham

5. “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

6. “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.”

— Margery Allingham

7. “A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it’s my only superstition.”

— Margery Allingham

8. “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

9. “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.”

— Margery Allingham

10. “Love so seldom means happiness.”

— Margery Allingham

11. “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.”

— Margery Allingham

12. “If one cannot command attention by one’s admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance.”

— Margery Allingham

13. “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.”

— Margery Allingham

14. “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?”

— Margery Allingham

15. “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.”

— Margery Allingham

16. “It was a little skirmish across a century.”

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

18. “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.”

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

20. “Good doctors get a mechanic’s pleasure in making you tick over.”

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

22. “People don’t alter. They may with enormous difficulty modify themselves, but they never really change.”

— Margery Allingham

23. “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

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

— Margery Allingham

25. “She rose and followed her bust from the room.”

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

27. “Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth.”

— Margery Allingham

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.”

— Margery Allingham

32. “Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world.”

— Margery Allingham

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

— Margery Allingham

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “As I see it, the word “private” is going plumb out of date. It’s goin’ to be an ole-fashioned concep’, mark my words. That’s a prophecy.”

— Margery Allingham

39. “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