Literary Birthday – 5 February – Margaret Millar
Margaret Millar was born 5 February 1915, and died 26 March 1994.
Margaret Millar Quotes
- Have you never noticed that most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of a witness?
- 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.
- Some people become so expert at reading between the lines they don’t read the lines.
- 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 recognise 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.
- The rest of us have monsters too, but we must call them by other names, or pretend they don’t exist.
- You can’t drown your troubles … because troubles can swim.
- 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.
- Don’t borrow trouble. The interest is too high.
Margaret Millar was an American-Canadian mystery and suspense writer. She penned 26 novels and a birdwatching memoir, The Birds and the Beasts Were There: The Joys of Birdwatching and Wildlife Observation in California’s Richest Habitat. Her novels include An Air That Kills
and Beast in View. In 1956 Millar won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel for Beast in View. In 1983, she won her second Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel for Banshee. In the same year, she was awarded the Grand Master Award by the Mystery Writers of America in recognition of her lifetime achievements. ‘She had a gift for writing realistic yet entertaining dialogue that furthered plot and revealed character.’ (via)
Source for image: Goodreads
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