Quotes from Agatha Christie

You know I want you. You know that I'd give my soul to pick you up in my arms and keep you here, hidden away from the world, forever and ever.

A secret de Polichinelle is a secret that everyone can know. For this reason the people who do not know it never hear about it - for if everyone thinks you know a thing, nobody tells you.

É il cervello, le piccole cellule grigie» si batté una mano sulla fronte, «la cosa su cui bisogna basarsi. I sensi inducono in errore. Bisogna cercare la verità dal di dentro, non dal di fuori.»

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human. Your criminal is someone who wants to be important, but who never will be important, because he'll always be less than a man

the horror of sitting at a tea table, looking across at my best loved friend, and suddenly realising that the person sitting there was a stranger. That, I think, describes best what Archie was like when he came. He went through the motions of ordinary greetings, but he was, quite simply, not Archie.

I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has. Goes to sleep all winter and doesn't eat anything more than grass as far as I know, to live all the summer. Not an interesting life perhaps, but a very peaceful one.

Are you really a detective, then?" "At your service, Madame." "I thought there were no detectives on the train when it passed through Yugo-Slavia—not until one got to Italy." "I am not a Yugo-Slavian detective, Madame. I am an international detective." "You belong to the League of Nations?" "I belong to the world, Madame," said Poirot dramatically.

About Miss Debenham," he said rather awkwardly. "You can take it from me that she's all right. She's a pukka sahib. "What," asked Dr. Constantine with interest, "does a pukka sahib mean?" "It means," said Poirot, "that Miss Debenham's father and brothers were at the same kind of school as Colonel Arbuthnot was." "Oh!" said Dr. Constantine, disappointed. "Then it has nothing to do with the crime at all." "Exactly," said Poirot.

I felt a distinct pleasure in passing on my own discomfiture.

It has just happened that I have found myself in the vicinity of murder rather more often than would seem normal.

To cry at will is not an easy accomplishment.

Well, perhaps you're right, Miss Blacklock, but my own diagnosis would be a severe attack of Nosey Parkeritis …

Loyalty it is a pestilential thing in crime. Again and again it obscures the truth.

You mean you really want to marry me?" she asked with the air of one getting a thing perfectly clear. "More than anything in the world," I said - and I meant it. "You mean, you're in love with me?" "I'm in love with you." Her eyes were steady and grave. She said: "I think you're the nicest person in the world - but I'm not in love with you." "I'll make you love me." "That wouldn't do. I don't want to be made.

No, doctor, I'm going to London. If things happen anywhere, they happen in London.

I congratulate you on having such a unique and beautiful problem.

She could be attractive when she wanted to be but life had taught her that efficiency and competence often paid better results and avoided painful complications.

Where there is murder, anything can happen.

Hemlock in the cocktails, wasn't it? Something of that kind.

Everything's the matter.

It was very like a dream. Like all dreamers, however, I could not let my dream alone. We poor humans are so anxious not to miss anything.

Either her dream had taken a very odd turn or else - or else Mary had really rushed into the room and had said (incredible! fantastic!) that there was a body in the library.

He had had a lonely life and a lonely death. But it had been the kind of loneliness that spends itself in living amongst people, and in passing the time that way not unpleasantly. Major Palgrave might have been a lonely man, he had also been quite a cheerful one.

But to succeed in life every detail should be arranged well beforehand.