63 Quotes by Josephine Tey

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.

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

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.

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

Fasting was good for the imagination but bad for logic.

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

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.

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.