Top 58 Tey Quotes
#1. People come up to me as I leave the stage after a performance and tell me tey saw my mother onstage with me every time I sing. I keep a sense of humor about it.
Lorna Luft
#2. I have a palate, Williams. A precious possession. And I have no intention of prostituting it to pickles.
Josephine Tey
#3. Before night,' as Nanny used to say of too exuberant children.
Josephine Tey
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. The light died on the window-sill as the last survivor of a charge dies on the enemy parapet, murdered but glorious.
Josephine Tey
#8. 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
#9. If Richard had not made friends he had certainly influenced people.
Josephine Tey
#11. Had their physical attractions proved insufficient because she had unconsciously asked more from them than they were able to give?
Josephine Tey
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. Lack of education is an extraordinary handicap when one is being offensive.
Josephine Tey
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. What had he ever wanted that he could not buy? And if that wasn't riches he didn't know what was.
Josephine Tey
#18. 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
#19. A thousand people drowned in floods in China are news: a solitary child drowned in a pond is tragedy.
Josephine Tey
#20. You can't have a tin can tied to your tail and go through life pretending it isn't there.
Josephine Tey
#21. I expect this is what death is like when you meet it. Sort of wildly unfair but inevitable.
Josephine Tey
#22. 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
#23. In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.
Josephine Tey
#25. The more windows on the world a policeman has the better he is likely to be at his job,
Josephine Tey
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Nothing in this world came out of satisfaction. Except the human race.
Josephine Tey
#29. A man may own a ship, but unless he is captain of a crew he goes where the ship goes.
Josephine Tey
#30. 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
#31. One would expect boredom to be a great yawning emotion, but it isn't, of course. It's a small niggling thing.
Josephine Tey
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. 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
#36. Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.
Josephine Tey
#38. 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
#39. One of the secrets of a successful life is to know how to be a little profitably crazy.
Josephine Tey
#40. Horse sense is the instinct that keeps horses from betting on men.
Josephine Tey
#41. Truth is often terribly thin, don't you think?
Josephine Tey
#42. If you think about the unthinkable long enough it becomes quite reasonable.
Josephine Tey
#43. After three days without one, the desire to read a newspaper vanished. And really, one was happier without.
Josephine Tey
#44. Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.
Josephine Tey
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. But it was never possible to forget that Searle was in a room. Why? she kept asking herself. Or rather, why not?
Josephine Tey
#49. 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
#51. Someone had said that if you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable.
Josephine Tey
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. The road will be one long, I'm sure at that. So far the real friends are few, but few more challanges and few of them will gone also, won't they?
Deyth Banger
#57. 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
#58. Most people's first books are their best anyways. It's the one they wanted most to write.
Josephine Tey
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