Patricia Wentworth Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Nobody likes to be accused of a virtue.

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

Most of the things one worries about never happen.

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.

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

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

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

Emotion which you do not share can become intolerable.

Too much information can be as disconcerting as too little.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Anger was both a disfiguring and a revealing passion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

happy people have got something to give to the world.

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

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

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

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