The Fashion in Shrouds Quotes

“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.”
― Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

“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.”
― Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

“Superintendent Stanislaus Oates of the Central Investigation Department, New Scotland Yard, was one of those happy people who retain throughout their lives a childlike belief in a sharp dividing line between that which is wrong and that which is right. It is this peculiarity which is common to all the great English policemen and is probably the basis of their reputation both for integrity and for stupidity.”
― Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

“It came out an overpowering story, hinting at sickly relatives dying in inaccessible parts of the island, cross-country journeys, and a noble, if exhausted Ramillies crawling gamely home to be persuaded by an adoring wife to snatch what rest he might before attempting the feat of endurance which lay before him as a passenger on an almost epic flight.”
― Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

“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

“One does not dislike the half of everything. You bore me, you young people, when you talk about one sex or the other, as if they were separate things. There is only one human entity and that is a man and a woman. The man is the silhouette, the woman is the detail. The one often spoils or makes the other. But apart they are so much material. Don't be a fool.”
― Margery Allingham, The Fashion in Shrouds

“Infatuation is one of those slightly comic illnesses which are at once so undignified and so painful that a nice-minded world does its best to ignore their existence altogether, referring to them only under provocation and then with apology, but, like its more material brother, this boil on the neck of the spirit can hardly be forgotten either by the sufferer or anyone else in his vicinity. The malady is ludicrous, sad, excruciating and, above all, instantly diagnosable.”
― Margery Allingham, The Fashion In Shrouds