Josephine Tey Quotes

The truth of anything at all doesn't lie in someone's account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper, the sale of a house, the price of a ring.

Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.

One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.

Nothing great ever came out of common sense.

It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade.

Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes.

Weak people can be very stubborn.

The trouble with you, dear, is that you think an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man with a bowler hat.

You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.

Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.

That was the way with grief: it left you alone for months together until you thought that you were cured, and then without warning it blotted out the sunlight.

It is not possible to love and be wise.

Truth is often terribly thin, don't you think?

Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.

After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.

I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.

A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction. Except the human race.

In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.

Truth isn’t in accounts but in account-books.

Riches ... don't consist in having things, but in not having to do something you don't want to do. ... Riches is being able to thumb your nose.

If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.

What had he ever wanted that he could not buy? And if that wasn't riches he didn't know what was.

Alan Grant: "There are... far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." The Midget (his nurse): "You sound constipated.

Grant had dealt too long with the human intelligence to accept as truth someone's report of someone's report of what that someone remembered to have seen or been told.

It would do her good to have some demons to fight, to be swung out in space and held over some bottomless pit now and then.