Quotes from Agatha Christie

It is fundamentals that matter --- not the trappings. (Alice Cunningham)

You are lucky, Renisenb. You have found the happiness that is inside everybody's own heart. To most women, happiness means coming and going, busied over small affairs. It is care for one's children and laughter and conversation and quarrels with other women and alternate love and anger with a man. It is made up of small things strung together like beads on a string.

From all I have heard, geniuses are people to be heartily disliked.

No human being should learn from another. Each individual should develop his own powers to the uttermost, not try to imitate those of someone else. I do not wish you to be a second and inferior Poirot. I wish you to be the supreme Hastings. And you are the supreme Hastings. In you, Hastings, I find the normal mind almost perfectly illustrated.

as long as Mary can't cook and has those awful manners—well, we're safe, nobody else would have her." I perceived that my wife's methods of housekeeping were not so entirely haphazard as I had imagined. A certain amount of reasoning underlay them. Whether it was worthwhile having a maid at the price of her not being able to cook, and having a habit of throwing dishes and remarks at one with the same disconcerting abruptness, was a debatable matter.

i like living. i have sometimes been wildly, dispairingly, acutely misrable, racked with sarrow, but threw it all i still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another.

Life is more worth living, more full of interest when you are likely to lose it. It shouldn't be, perhaps, but it is. When you're young and strong and healthy, and life stretches ahead of you, living isn't really important at all. It's young people who commit suicide easily, out of despair from love, sometimes from sheer anxiety and worry. But old people know how valuable life is and how interesting. - Jane Marple

Mr. Beresford put down the Daily Mail, which he was reading, and applauded with somewhat unnecessary vigour. He was politely requested by his colleague not to be an ass.

You arouse my gastronomical juices, madame.

In my opinion half the people who spend their lives avoiding being run over by buses had much better be run over and put safely out of the way. They're no good.

Well, of course, it was not any of my business but you get very queer glimpses of life sometimes, and you can't help speculating about them.

A very correct butler opened the door, with just the right amount of gloom in his bearing.

The young have very curious views on unselfishness.

Ye Gods and Little Fishes," said Sir Henry, "can it be? George, it's my own particular, one and only four starred Pussy. The super Pussy of all old Pussies...

You yourself are English and yet you do not seem to appreciate the quality of the English reaction to a direct question. It is invariably one of suspicion and the natural result is reticence.

A man in love is a sorry spectacle.

Such a sweet letter from Lady Conway... You remember my telling you about her? Her memory's bad. Can't recognize her relations always and tells them to go away." "That might be shrewdness really," said Miss Marple, "rather than a loss of memory.

It is perfectly clear. Mr. Owen is one of us.…

Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success.

It is a great advantage to be intelligent and not to look it.

It's as easy to utter lies as truth

He felt a strange pang. It was, perhaps, the fault of old Mr Jonathan, speaking of Juliet... No Juliet here - unless perhaps one could imagine Juliet a survivor - living on, deprived of Romeo... Was it not an essential part of Juliet's make-up that that she should die young?

Man is an unoriginal animal," said Hercule Poirot