Patricia Wentworth Quotes

it isn't good tactics to ask for something that you know will be refused.

Being in a rage was rather like being out in a thunderstorm - you couldn't hear yourself think.

Too much information can be as disconcerting as too little.

The most trying moments in human experience were those in which there was nothing to be done except to wait.

My dear father always said that when everybody had a telephone nobody would have any manners, because there wouldn't be time for them. And of course he was perfectly right.

Any road is bound to arrive somewhere if you follow it far enough

happy people have got something to give to the world.

Things you can't understand are always the hardest to bear. To know why is the first step to consolation.

Nobody likes to be accused of a virtue.

The fact is, people who don't have any misfortunes are very irritating to their neighbours. No opportunities for popping in with condolences and new-laid eggs. No visits to the afflicted. No opportunities for the milk of human kindness to flow. Naturally it doesn't.

It is the man who is sure of himself who disregards the opinion of the world. To be sure is to have power.

When you've just made the most complete fool of yourself, you feel the need of a specially high horse to ride.

You cannot divide minds into sexes. Each human being presents an individual problem.

when married people begin to talk about their rights, it means something has gone pretty far wrong between them.

A good many established writers seem to have the feeling that some day they are going to be found out, revealed as frauds.

if you cannot get what you want, common sense suggests that you should put your mind to wanting what you can get.

Take things as they come. Take things as they are. What does it matter? There's one end to everything.

... the things that happened in your body were never as bad as the things that happened in your mind.

When there is too much to say it is easier to say nothing at all.

Anger was both a disfiguring and a revealing passion.

Emotion which you do not share can become intolerable.

There is and always has been for me a peculiar need to write. This is very different from wanting to be a writer. To be a writer always seemed something so far removed from my talents and abilities and imaginings that it didn't afflict me at all as a notion when I was young. But I was always conscious that I wanted to write.

Mary Stuart wrote, 'My end is in my beginning.' It is easier to agree with her than to decide what is the beginning, and what is the end.

One cannot withdraw from the life of the community. Injury to one member of it cannot fail to be the concern of all.

A lie that is half a truth is ever the hardest to fight.

Money's a very serious thing - especially when you haven't got any.

Children want one thing at a time, and want that one thing passionately.

Most of the things one worries about never happen.

The fact is, for most of us, what happens to ourselves is so much more important than what happens to other people that the smallest mote in our own eye will prevent us from being unduly harrowed by someone else's beam.

Love and a cold cannot be hid. It is, I believe, a Spanish proverb.

Once a suggestion has entered the general atmosphere of human thought, it is very difficult to neutralise it.

There is a country proverb which says, 'If you don't trouble trouble - trouble won't trouble you.

Anyone who pretends not to be interested in money is either a fool or a knave.

I used to do miserably in English literature, which I thought was a sign of moral turpitude. As I look back on it, I think it was rather to my credit. The notion of actually putting writers' words into other words is quite ridiculous because why bother if writers mean what they mean, and if they don't, why read them? There is, I suppose, a case for studying literary works in depth, but I don't quite know what 'in depth' means unless you read a paragraph over and over again.

there are virtues which are very well in the abstract, but which, encountered in the flesh, can be a source of extreme irritation.

There's a general consensus of opinion that people in love are apt to look silly -- except to each other.

It's surprising how soon you can get used to having money. It's much easier than getting used to not having it.

I do not approve of children being beaten. It is always a confession of failure.

Husbands and wives quarrel a lot more than anyone thinks, and it's oftener about little things than big ones.

You can't do such a lot and do it all so well and have much time left for the ordinary human feelings.

It is always better to say too little than too much.