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1 " 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 (Albert Campion Mystery, #9)
2 " 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. "
3 " 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 (Albert Campion Mystery, #3)
4 " There are some people to whom muddled thinking and self-deception are the two most unforgivable crimes in the world. "
― Margery Allingham , The Fashion in Shrouds (Albert Campion Mystery, #10)
5 " There are, fortunately, very few people who can say that they have actually attended a murder. "
― Margery Allingham , Death of a Ghost (Albert Campion Mystery, #6)
6 " 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. "
7 " Waiting is one of the great arts. "
― Margery Allingham , The Tiger in the Smoke (Albert Campion Mystery, #14)
8 " Albert Campion: 'I’m serious!'Lugg: 'That’s unhealthy in itself. "
― Margery Allingham , Mystery Mile (Albert Campion Mystery, #2)
9 " The fat man, taken by surprise, was very hurt."Search me, Missus.""I might if I had the time. Her bright eyes, small and dark as his own, took in his great bulk with wicked amusement. "What are you carrying about with you? The dome of St Paul's?""Ho! Who's talking, eh?" As the insult went home he forgot all caution. "Margot Fonteyn of the Convent Garden I suppose. "
10 " Up the well known creek "
― Margery Allingham
11 " She rose and followed her bust from the room. "
12 " 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. "
13 " It was a little skirmish across a century. "
― Margery Allingham , Black Plumes
14 " 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 (Albert Campion Mystery, #4)
15 " Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close. "
16 " 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. "
17 " Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world. "
18 " 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. "
19 " 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. "
20 " 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. "
