Top 56 Josephine Tey Quotes

#1. That is why historians surprise me. They seem to have no talent for the likeliness of any situation. They see history like a peepshow; with two-dimensional figures against a distant background.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #125203
#2. Doormats. It was true that actors had a perception, an understanding of human motive, that normal people lacked. It had nothing to do with intelligence, and very little to do with education.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #134353
#3. There was no room in his life for Marta, and none in her life for him; but it was a pity, all the same.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #136842
#4. Nothing great ever came out of common sense.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #193511
#5. Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #201233
#6. Truth isn't in accounts but in account-books.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #218333
#7. What happened in 1603?" Grant asked, his mind still on Tyrrel. "We had the Scots tied to our tails for good." "Better than having them at our throats every five minutes.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #222375
#8. One of the secrets of a successful life is to know how to be a little profitably crazy.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #264168
#9. Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #293739
#10. Truth is often terribly thin, don't you think?

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #293799
#11. If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #301734
#12. After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #309787
#13. Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #311036
#14. One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #321474
#15. 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.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #352702
#16. But no, Potticary, poor fool, brushed his boots for love of it. He probably had a slave mentality; but had never read enough for it to worry him.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #379599
#17. But it was never possible to forget that Searle was in a room. Why? she kept asking herself. Or rather, why not?

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #404524
#18. 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.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #449257
#19. He is much too personable to be wholesome.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #476594
#20. Someone had said that if you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #547975
#21. Ruth puts in all the tiddley bits and the expression and doesn't mind how many wrong notes she strikes, but with Jane it is accuracy or nothing. I don't know which Chopin would have hated more, Eleanor said, folding bread and butter into a thickness that would match her appetite.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #553108
#22. There were people whose only interest in life was writing letters. To the newspapers, to authors, to strangers, to City Councils, to the police. It did not much matter to whom; the satisfaction of writing seemed to be all.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #600973
#23. 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.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #604940
#24. 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.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #725811
#25. How old was More when Richard succeeded?
He was five.
When that dramatic council scene had taken place at the Tower, Thomas More had been five years old. He had been only eight when Richard died at Bosworth.
Everything in that history had been hearsay.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #788113
#26. Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #795427
#27. 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.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #831833
#28. She was afraid of what she called the young man's "personableness." She distrusted it for itself, and hated it as a potential threat to her house.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #850925
#29. Before night,' as Nanny used to say of too exuberant children.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #961774
#30. 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.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #963001
#31. There are far too many people born into the world, and far too many words written. Millions and millions of them pouring from the presses every minute. It's a horrible thought." "You sound constipated," said The Midget.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1042993
#32. There is a limit to one's capacity for rows, you know. There comes a time when you're only too ready to sacrifice something for a quiet life.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1169278
#33. The light died on the window-sill as the last survivor of a charge dies on the enemy parapet, murdered but glorious.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1218583
#34. If there is anything that is likely to put me to sleep," he said, "it would be an English history book. So you can hold hands with a clear conscience." "I'm going with Nurse Burrows." "You can still hold hands." "I've no patience with you," she said patiently and faded backwards into the gloom.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1222696
#35. If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1286274
#36. Weak people can be very stubborn.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1307882
#37. Had their physical attractions proved insufficient because she had unconsciously asked more from them than they were able to give?

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1338602
#38. 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.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1388166
#39. Lack of education," old Mrs. Sharpe said thoughtfully, "is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive. They had no resources at all.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1396064
#40. Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1404767
#41. It was pleasant to talk shop again; to use that elliptical, allusive speech that one uses only with another of one's trade.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1420162
#42. I have a palate, Williams. A precious possession. And I have no intention of prostituting it to pickles.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1461393
#43. What had he ever wanted that he could not buy? And if that wasn't riches he didn't know what was.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1495901
#44. The worst of pushing horrible things down into one's subconscious is that when they pop up again they are as fresh as if they had been in a refrigerator. You haven't allowed time to get at them to-to mould them over a little.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1515535
#45. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1532059
#46. You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1552174
#47. I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1562448
#48. For Liz, all American men were divided into two classes: those who treated you as if you were a frail old lady, and those who treated you as if you were just frail.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1617324
#49. In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1671302
#50. It is not possible to love and be wise.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1716347
#51. The more windows on the world a policeman has the better he is likely to be at his job,

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1759784
#52. The jury, having swallowed at one nauseating gulp the business of viewing the body, had settled into their places with that air of conscious importance and simulated modesty which belongs to those initiated into a mystery.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1764227
#53. And Hopkins, seeing that Tisdall was unaware of Grant's identity, rushed in with glad maliciousness. "That is Scotland Yard," he said. "Inspector Grant. Never had an unsolved crime to his name." "I hope you write my obituary," Grant said. "I hope I do!" the journalist said, with fervor.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1769007
#54. Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction. Except the human race.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1779549
#55. A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1779668
#56. The quality of Scotchness was a highly concentrated essence, and should always be diluted. As an ingredient it was admirable; neat, it was as abominable as ammonia.

Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey Quotes #1804086

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