Quotes from Agatha Christie

But it is not always the people who say most who do most.

There was something magical about an island—the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world—an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return. He thought: "I'm leaving my ordinary life behind me." And, smiling to himself, he began to make plans, fantastic plans for the future. He was still smiling when he walked up the rock-cut steps. In

Do you remember the Lady of Shalott? The mirror crack'd from side to side: 'The doom has come upon me,' cried the Lady of Shalott. Well, that's what she looked like. People laugh at Tennyson nowadays, but the Lady of Shalott always thrilled me when I was young and it still does.

When youth begins to pass, fun isn't fun any longer.

and proceeding to follow the example of the devil in quoting Scripture for his own ends I added: "She looketh to the ways of her household….

May your moustaches never grow less.

You weren't quite accurate just now." "I? Not accurate?" Poirot sounded affronted.

His poems have no capital letters in them, which is, I believe, the essence of modernity.

It's so dreadfully easy...killing people… And you begin to feel that it doesn't matter…That it's only you that matters! It's dangerous...that.

A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love, he can't help looking like a sheep. Now, whenever that young man looked at you, he looked like a sheep. I take back all I said this morning. It is genuine.

Melchett said gloomily, 'Well, we know where we are -- or rather, where we aren't!' 'Where we aren't expresses it rather better, sir.

Only cats and witches walk in the dark.

For whom will a woman lie? Sometimes for herself, usually for the man she loves, always for her children.

Murder is a nasty business on an empty stomach.

Women are fiends-absolute fiends.

After all, perhaps dirt isn't really so unhealthy as one is brought up to believe.

And families now, families who have been separated throughout the year, assemble once more together. Now under these conditions, my friend, you must admit that there will occur a great amount of strain. People who do not feel amiable are putting great pressure on themselves to appear amiable! There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c'est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy.

But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.

Eh bien, then, you are crazy, or appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you may be crazy.

To get at the cause for a thing, we must study the effect.

We're all mad, dear lady," he said as he ushered her in through the door. "That's the secret of existence. We're all a little mad.

At a small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction- it fascinated rather than repelled. She sat very upright. Round her neck was a collar of very large pearls which, improbable though it seemed, were real. Her hands were covered with rings. Her sable coat was pushed back on her shoulders. A very small and expensive black toque was hideously unbecoming to the yellow, toad-like face beneath it.

But I always find it prudent to suspect everybody just a little. What I say is, you really never know, do you?

Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.