Quotes from Agatha Christie

At first, I was polite. Really. I said "excuse me," I tried to squeeze through gaps, even apologized for stepping on some toes. What can I say, I'm Canadian.

But that's the worst of these attractive young women with affectionate dispositions. They'll say anything, and they mean absolutely nothing by it.

Why do you decry the world we live in? There are good people in it. Isn't muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that's imposed, a world order that may be right today and wrong tomorrow? I would rather have a world of kindly, faulty, human beings, than a world of superior robots who've said goodbye to pity and understanding and sympathy.

A woman should have a certain respect for herself and not submit to humiliation

If you must be Sherlock Holmes," she observed, "I'll get you a nice little syringe and a bottle labelled cocaine, but for God's sake leave that violin alone.

But afterwards you went on remembering.

Have you ever reflected, Madame, on the enormous part that Hearsay plays in life. "Mr. A said," "Mrs. B. told us." "Miss C. explained why –" and so on. And if the known facts seem to fit with what we have been told, then we never question them. There are so many things that do not concern us, and so we do not bother to uncover the actual facts.

What a person really is, is only apparent when the test comes—that is, the moment when you stand or fall on your own feet.

so many people are a little queer, aren't they?--in fact, most people are when you know them well.

Every one's got their own ways of working. I know that. I give my inspectors a free hand always. Every one's got to find out for themselves what method suits them best.

Well, you can't go about having blood feuds and stabbing each other like Crosicans or the Mafia," said the Colonel. "Say what you like, trial by jury is a sound system

I was wrong about that young man of yours. 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.

Human nature is always interesting, Sir Henry. And it's curious to see how certain types always tend to act in exactly the same way.

Murder—the wish to do murder—is something quite different. It—how shall I say?—it defies God.

And suddenly, with a terrific shock, with that feeling as of blurring on a cinematograph screen before the picture comes to focus, Hercule Poirot realized that this artificially set scene had a point of reality...

I suppose I saw photos of him in the papers, but I wouldn't recognize my own mother when a press photographer had done with her.

A madman is a very dangerous thing.

Well, people are like that too. They create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is bare rock... And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself.

Me and my old man went on a coach trip to Switzerland and Italy once and it was a whole hour further on there. Must be something to do with this Common Market. I don't hold with the Common Market and nor does Mr. Curtain. England's good enough for me.

The accepted version of certain facts is not necessarily the true one.

It was a cheap school, you know, and the teachers weren't very good. They could never answer questions properly." "Very few teachers can," I{Jerry}said. "Why not? They ought to." I agreed.

How absurd to call youth the time of happiness—youth, the time of greatest vulnerability!

La mejor receta para la novela policíaca: el detective no debe saber nunca más que el lector.

Ah, but people don't run true to form in love affairs.