Quotes by Margery Allingham

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.

In common with many Christians of the classic type he felt sincerely safer and more at ease when he had given away all he had, like a man passing a ball in a game.

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?

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

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.

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.

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.

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.

Chemists employed by the police can do remarkable things with blood. They can find it in shreds of cloth, in the interstices of floor boards, on the iron of a heel, and can measure it and swear to it and weave it into a rope to hang a man.

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