Best 32 quotes of Josephine Tey on MyQuotes

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

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

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.

He knew by heart every last minute crack on its surface. He had made maps of the ceiling and gone exploring on them; rivers, islands, and continents. He had made guessing games of it and discovered hidden objects; faces, birds, and fishes. He made mathematical calculations of it and rediscovered his childhood; theorems, angles, and triangles. There was practically nothing else he could do but look at it. He hated the sight of it.

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

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

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

In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.

It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in mirrors and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of personality. Vanity says, "I must have this because I am me." It is a frightening thing because it is incurable.

It's an odd thing but when you tell someone the true facts of a mythical tale they are indignant not with the teller but with you. They don't want to have their ideas upset. It rouses some vague uneasiness in them, I think, and they resent it. So they reject it and refuse to think about it. If they were merely indifferent it would be natural and understandable. But it is much stronger than that, much more positive. They are annoyed. Very odd, isn't it.

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

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

Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Weak people can be very stubborn.

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

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.

Ever seen the old conjurer's trick of a lady sawn in half? There's a strong aroma of sawn lady about this...don't you smell it?

Grant paused in the act of turning the thing over, to consider the face a moment longer. A judge? A soldier? A prince? Someone used to great responsibility, and responsible in his authority. Someone too-conscientious. A worrier; perhaps a perfectionist. A man at ease in a large design, but anxious over details. A candidate for gastric ulcer. Someone, too, who had suffered ill-health as a child. He had that incommunicable, that indescribable look that childhood suffering leaves behind it; less positive than the look on a cripple’s face, but as inescapable. This the artist had both understood and translated into terms of paint. The slight fullness of the lower eyelid, like a child that has slept too heavily; the texture of the skin; the old-man look in a young face. He turned the portrait over to look for a caption. On the back was printed: Richard the Third. From the portrait in the National Portrait Gallery. Artist Unknown.

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.

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.

She put her cup down and sighed again with pleasure. "I can't think how the Nonconformists have failed to discover coffee." "Discover it?" "Yes. As a snare. It does far more for one than drink. And yet no one preaches about it, or signs pledges about it. Five mouthfuls and the world looks rosy.

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