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Margaret Millar QUOTES

Margaret Millar QUOTES

1 " It was a street of conformity; where identical houses were painted at the same time every spring, a place of rules where gardens, parenthood and the future were planned with equal care, and even if everything went wrong the master plan remained in effect–keep up appearances, clip the hedges, mow the lawn, so that no one will suspect that there’s a third mortgage and that Mother’s headaches are caused by martinis not migraine. "

― Margaret Millar , The Listening Walls

2 " Animosity hung between them like a two-edged sword; neither of them could use it without first getting hurt herself. "

― Margaret Millar , Beast In View

3 " The desk clerk, whose name plate identified him as G. O. Horner, was a thin elderly man with protuberant eyes that gave him an expression of intense interest and curiosity. The expression was false. After thirty years in the business, people meant no more to him than individual bees do to a beekeeper. Their differences were lost in a welter of statistics, eradicated by sheer weight of numbers. They came and went, ate, drank, were happy, sad, thin, fat, stole towels and left behind toothbrushes, books, girdles, jewelry, burned holes in the furniture, slipped in bathtubs, jumped out windows. They were all alive. swarming around the hive, and Mr. Horner wore a protective net of indifference over his head and shoulders. "

― Margaret Millar , Beast In View

4 " Some people become so expert at reading between the lines
they don't read the lines. "

― Margaret Millar , An Air That Kills

5 " The rest of us have monsters too, but we must call them by other names, or pretend they don't exist... "

― Margaret Millar , Beyond This Point Are Monsters

6 " The world of maps is nice and flat and simple. It has areas for people and areas for monsters. What a shock it is to discover the world is round and the areas merge and nothing separates the monsters and ourselves; that we are all whirling around in space together and there isn't even a graceful way of falling off. "

― Margaret Millar , Beyond This Point Are Monsters

7 " You have a low opinion of yourself, Helen."
"I wasn't born with it."
"Where did you get it?"
'The story" she said, "is too long to tell, and too dull to listen to. "

― Margaret Millar , Beast In View

8 " The sidewalks swarmed with people, the night was full of the noises of the living. They struck Miss Clarvoe's ears strangely, like sounds from another planet. "

― Margaret Millar , Beast In View

9 " It didn’t even seem ironic to him that he should be planning remarks about truth and justice when, in fact, his whole life had been a marathon race, with truth a few jumps ahead of him and justice a few jumps behind. He had never caught up with the one, and the other had never caught up with him. "

― Margaret Millar , A Stranger In My Grave

10 " The two women looked at each other as if through the periscopes of enemy submarines across a fathomless and crawling sea. "

― Margaret Millar , Vanish in an Instant