Josephine Tey quotes:

Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

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

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

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.

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.

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!

Weak people can be very stubborn.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.

Nothing great ever came out of common sense.

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

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

It is not possible to love and be wise.

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

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

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.

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.

In hospitals there is no time off for good behavior.

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

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

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