Margery Allingham

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.

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.

A genuine coincidence always means bad luck for me; it's my only superstition.

If one cannot command attention by one's admirable qualities one can at least be a nuisance.

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.

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.

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?

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

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.