Life & Wisdom Quote by Margery Allingham

Allingham skewers the mythology of how we think. She sets up two respectable routes to truth - the "decent process" of logic and the romantic "flash" of intuition - then refuses both, planting her character in the messy middle where most real knowledge actually lives. The joke lands because it punctures a cultural vanity: we like our conclusions to look earned (deduced) or gifted (inspired). Allingham insists they are usually assembled: part observation, part hunch, part accident, part bias, with the seams showing.

The sentence is engineered like a detective plot. It dangles a binary, then reveals a third option that feels almost embarrassing in its accuracy. Words like "shoddy" and "untidy" carry moral charge; they imply not just imperfection but a kind of intellectual sloppiness. Yet the final clause - "by which one usually gets to know things" - turns that scolding into an admission. The shabby method is not an exception; it is the norm, the human condition.

As a crime writer, Allingham is also defending her genre's realism. Detection in fiction is often sold as pure rationality, the Holmesian fantasy of immaculate inference. Allingham quietly corrects it: the work is improvisational, social, contingent. Clues don't line up; people don't reason cleanly; understanding arrives through half-thoughts and crosshatched impressions. The intent isn't to celebrate muddle for its own sake, but to name the actual process we prefer to disguise - and to let readers feel, with a sting of recognition, that their own "knowing" is built the same way.