Margery Allingham

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.

There are some people to whom muddled thinking and self-deception are the two most unforgivable crimes in the world.

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.

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.

Waiting is one of the great arts.

I am one of those people who are blessed ... with a nature which has to interfere. If I see a thing that needs doing I do it.

The optimism of a healthy mind is indefatigable.

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.

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.

However carefully a judge is protected by the experience and the logic of the law, there must be times -not many, I know, or we should have no judges- when the same frightful question must be answered. Not faced, you see, but answered. Every now and again he must have to say to himself, in effect, "Everyone agrees that this colour is black, and my reason tells me it is so, but on my soul, do I know?

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.

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