Margaret Millar Quotations

Life is something that happens to you while you're making other plans.

Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness.

To the uneducated eye, as to the incurious mind, much of the world is in darkness, and a thousand songs are lost on the unlistening ear.

I didn't mind giving up carnality, jewelry and red meat in return for comradeship and an afterlife.

If you go around looking for accidents, asking for them, they can't be called accidents any more.

Perfect young men don't get murdered, they don't even get born.

Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don't read the lines.

You have what is known as a lot of character, meaning you can be wrong at the top of your lungs.

That's what a conscience is made of, scar tissue ... Little strips and pieces of remorse sewn together year by year until they formed a distinctive pattern, a design for living.

Don't borrow trouble. The interest is too high.

Civilization has imposed countless restrictions and conventions on each of us, with the result that the subconscious in the majority of us has become a storage room without a key. We are forced to suppress or forget so many events and ideas and thoughts that those to which we should have access are lost in the welter. However, there are people who seem capable of unlocking this part of their minds and extracting relevant information.

the smell of lilacs crept poignantly into the room like a remembered spring.

I've reached the age where anyone who lets me talk seems like an old By listening to my memories, you have become part of them.

When you're counting alibis and not apples, one plus one equals none.

The day will probably come when you can tell everything about a person from his dreams except his age and weight.

The sun was shining like a congratulation.

the emotions at death, as at birth, are instinctive and primitive.

People, alas, are more impressed by statistics than they are by ideas.

Private problems don't constitute an excuse for bad manners.

Sanity is a matter of culture and convention. If it's a crazy culture you live in, then you have to be irrational to want to conform. A completely rational person would recognize that the culture was crazy and refuse to conform. But by not conforming, he is the one who would be judged crazy by that particular society.

I wish people would quit telling me to think. I think. Thinking's easy. It's not thinking that's hard.

Shrews are made, not born.

You can't drown your troubles ... because troubles can swim.

Any good marriage involves a certain amount of play-acting.

Common sense is a vastly overrated virtue. I myself prefer the spark of genius.

The smell of moist earth and lilacs hung in the air like wisps of the past and hints of the future.

When someone gives me three reasons instead of one, I'm inclined not to believe any of them.

There is no such thing as an ex-exhibitionist.

Violence is the instinctive response to fear.

The world of maps is nice and flat and simple. It has areas for people and areas for monsters. What a shock it is to discover the world is round and the areas merge and nothing separates the monsters and ourselves; that we are all whirling around in space together and there isn't even a graceful way of falling off.