Agatha Christie Quotes - Page 2

But who thinks of death in the middle of life?"-Mike RogersEndless Night by Agatha Christie
Agatha Christie
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.
Agatha Christie
A man who has shot lions in large quantities has an unfair advantage over other men.
Agatha Christie
Yes, it was dangerous, but we are not put into this world, Mr. Burton, to avoid danger when an important fellow creature's life is at stake. You understand me?
Agatha Christie
There are, of course, the people who revolve around themselves--but I agree with you, she's not one of that kind. She's totally uninterested in herself. And yet she's got a strong character--there must be something. I thought at first it was her art--but it isn't. I've never met anyone so detached from life. That's dangerous.''Dangerous? What do you mean?''Well, you see--it must mean an obsession of some kind, and obsessions are always dangerous.
Agatha Christie
It's extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often - both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.
Agatha Christie
I believe at least in one of the chief tenets of the Christian faith--contentment with a lowly place. I am a doctor and I know that ambition--the desire to succeed--to have power--leads to most ills of the human soul. If the desire is realized it leads to arrogance, violence and final satiety; and if it is denied--ah! if it is denied--let all the asylums for the insane rise up and give their testimony! The are filled with human beings who were unable to face being mediocre, insignificant, ineffective and who therefore created for themselves ways of escape from reality so to be shut off from life itself forever.
Agatha Christie
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.
Agatha Christie
People bicker so and have such rows. Even if they're fond of each other, they still seem to have rows and not to mind a bit whether they have them in public or not.
Agatha Christie
Edna restored the toffee to the centre of her tongue and sucking pleasurably, resumed her typing of Naked Love by Armand Levine. Its painstaking eroticism left her uninterested--as indeed it did most of Mr. Levine's readers, in spite of his efforts. He was a notable example of the fact that nothing can be duller than dull pornography.
Agatha Christie
In fact,' said Poirot, 'she stabbed him in the dark, not realising that he was dead already, but somehow deduced that he had a watch in his pyjama pocket, took it out, put back the hands blindly and gave it the requisite dent.
Agatha Christie
Where there is murder, anything can happen.
Agatha Christie
Poirot said "you will find,M.le docteur,if you have much to do with cases of this kind,that they all resemble each other in one thing.""what is that?" I asked curiously"everyone concerned in them has something to hide
Agatha Christie
Don’t go,” said Cedric. “Murder has made you practically one of the family.
Agatha Christie
I should have known when I first saw that picture. For it is a very remarkable picture. It is the picture of a murderess painted by her victim-it is the picture of a girl watching her lover dies.
Agatha Christie
And anyway who the devil should I want to murder?""That would be a very good question," said Miss Marple. "I have not yet had the pleasure of sufficient conversation with you to evolve a theory as to that."Mr. Rafter's smile broadened."Conversations with you might be dangerous," he said."Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide," said Miss Marple.
Agatha Christie
[Murder] doesn't concern the victim and the guilty only. It affects the innocent too. You and I are innocent, but the shadow of murder has touched us. We don't know how that shadow is going to affect our lives.
Agatha Christie
People more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.
Agatha Christie
That was what murder was-as easy as that!But afterwards you went on remembering...
Agatha Christie
What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one's house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean.
Agatha Christie
Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop…suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head.
Agatha Christie
Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.
Agatha Christie
Wwhat the hell? Weve all got to die sometime!
Agatha Christie
The law. Lady Frances, is an uncertain animal. It has twists and turns that surprise the non-legal mind.
Agatha Christie
It's a rotten job, but somebody's got to do it.
Agatha Christie
The eye is diverted from the real business, it is caught by the spectacular action that means nothing--nothing at all.
Agatha Christie
When he passed me in the restaurant," he said at last, "I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal – an animal savage, but savage! you understand – had passed me by.""And yet he looked altogether of the most respectable.""Précisément! The body – the cage – is everything of the most respectable – but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.""You are fanciful, mon vieux," said M. Bouc. "It may be so. But I could not rid myself of the impression that evil had passed me by very close." (1.2.52-56)
Agatha Christie
I know there's a proverb which that says 'To err is human,' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.
Agatha Christie
A susceptible child is capable of great hero worship, and a young mind can easily be obsessed by an idea which persists into adult life.
Agatha Christie
It is romantic, yes,’ agreed Hercule Poirot. ‘It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun’.
Agatha Christie
I like a good detective story," he said. "But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The  story begins long before that—years before sometimes with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.
Agatha Christie
It's all very well to talk like that,” said Mr. Rafiel. “We, you say? What do you think I can do about it? I can't even walk without help. How can you and I set about preventing a murder? You're about a hundred and I'm a broken-up old crock.
Agatha Christie
If Hori were to die, I should not forget! Hori is a song in my heart for ever... That means-that there is no more death...
Agatha Christie
Her sleep was enlivened by several dreams. One where Professor Wanstead's bushy eyebrows fell off because they were not his own eyebrows, but false ones. As she woke again, her first impression was that which often follows dreams, a belief that the dream in question had solved everything. 'Of course,' she thought, 'of course!' His eyebrows were false and that solved the whole thing. He was the criminal.
Agatha Christie
I think people more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possible because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.
Agatha Christie
The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.
Agatha Christie
The Roar of the engine penetrated through Bertram's Hotel from the street outside. Colonel Luscombe perceived that Ladislaus Malinowski was one of Elvira's heroes. "Well," he thought to himself, "better than one of those pop singers or crooners or long-haired Beatles or whatever they called themselves." Luscombe was old-fashioned in his views of young men.
Agatha Christie
She breathed an enormous sigh, looked at Poirot, Looked away, and suddenly blurted out, "You're too old. Nobody told me you were so old. I really don't want to be rude but - there it is. You're too old. I'm really sorry." She turned abruptly and blundered out of the room, rather like a desperate moth in lamplight. Poirot, his mouth open, heard the bang of the front door. He ejaculated: "Non d'un nom d'un nom...
Agatha Christie
Miss Howard: Like a good detective story myself. Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last Chapter. Everyone dumbfounded. Real crime - you'd know at once.
Agatha Christie
You are the patient one, Mademoiselle,' said Poirot to Miss Debenham.She shrugged her shoulders slightly. 'What else can one do?'You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.'That implies a detached attitude. I think my attitude is more selfish. I have learned to save myself useless emotion.
Agatha Christie
Thought is yours only. Nobody can alter or influence the use you mean to make of it.
Agatha Christie
Sitting here, literally amongst the dead, reckoning up gains and losses, casting accounts, I have come to see gains that cannot be reckoned in terms of wealth, and losses that are more damaging than loss of a crop... I look at the River and I see the lifeblood of Egypt that has existed before we lived and that will exist after we die... Life and death, Renisenb, are not of such great account.
Agatha Christie
It has been my experience, that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.
Agatha Christie
...But even then you have to reckon with a criminal's chief vice.''What is that?'' Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.
Agatha Christie
Who was there to guard youth from pain and death - youth who could not, who had never been able to, guard itself? Did they know too little? Or was it that they knew too much, and therefore thought they knew it all?
Agatha Christie
Maybe it is because I am an old man, but I find, M. Poirot, that there is something about the defenselessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless - so sure. So generous and so demanding.
Agatha Christie
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?
Agatha Christie
Juliet singles out Romeo. Desdemona claims Othello. They have no doubts, the young, no fear, no pride.
Agatha Christie
There is something about the defencelessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless--so sure. So generous and so demanding.
Agatha Christie
It is the courage, the insistence, the ruthless force of youth.
Agatha Christie
You are young still. Naturally, one tries this, that and the other, but what one eventually settles down into is the life one prefers.
Agatha Christie
And they had no idea that they and many others were automatically pronounced deadly dull solely on that account. Only by the young of course, but then, they would have thought indulgently, young people knew nothing about life. Poor dears, they were always worrying about examinations, or their sex life, or buying some extraordinary clothes, or doing some extraordinary things to their hair to make them more noticeable.
Agatha Christie
I suppose, like most young people nowadays, boredom is what you dread most in the world, and yet, I can assure you, there are worse things.
Agatha Christie
He has neither what I call the outward vision (seeing details all around you what is called an observant person) nor the inner vision--concentration, the focusing of the mind on one object. He has a purposefully limited vision. He sees only what blends and harmonises with the bent of his mind.
Agatha Christie
You are, madame, so perfectly armoured, so completely sure of yourself.''Now I wonder, if I am to take that as a compliment?''It is, perhaps, a warning--not to treat life with arrogance.
Agatha Christie
Papa always said that in the beginning men and women roamed the world together, equal in strength - like lions and tigers -""And giraffes?" interpolated Colonel Race slyly. I laughed. Everyone makes fun of that giraffe."And giraffes. They were nomadic, you see. It wasn't till they settled down in communities, and women did one kind of thing and men another, that women got weak. And of course, underneath, one is still the same - one feels the same, I mean - and that is why women worship physical strength in men - it's what they once had and have lost.""Almost ancestor worship, in fact?" "Something of the kind.""And you really think that's true? That women worship strength, I mean?""I think it's quite true - if one's honest. You think you admire moral qualities,but when you fall in love, you revert to the primitive where the physical is all that counts. But I don't think that's the end, if you lived in primitive conditions it would be all right, but you don't - and so, in the end, the other thing wins after all. It's the things that are apparently conquered that always do win, isn't it? They win in the only way that counts. Like what the Bible says about losing your life and finding it.”.“In the end," said Colonel Race thoughtfully, "you fall in love - and you fall out of it, is that what you mean?""Not exactly, but you can put it that way if you like.
Agatha Christie
She's not sensual. She doesn't want affairs. It's just cold-blooded experiment on her part and the fun of stirring people up and setting them against each other. She dabbled in that too. She's the sort of woman who's never had a row with anyone in her life--but rows always happen where she is! She makes them happen. She's kind of female Iago. She must have drama. But she doesn't want to be involved herself. She's always outside pulling strings--looking on--enjoying it!
Agatha Christie
Too much mercy... often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.
Agatha Christie
She looked at them with shining eyes. Her chin went up. She said: "You regard it as impossible that a sinner should be struck down by the wrath of God! I do not!" The judge stroked his chin. He murmured in a slightly ironic voice: "My dear lady, in my experience of ill-doing, Providence leaves the work of conviction and chastisement to us mortals-and the process is often fraught with difficulties. There are no short cuts.
Agatha Christie
I was thinking, that when my time comes, I should be sorry if the only plea I had to offer was that of justice. Because it might mean that only justice would be meted out to me.
Agatha Christie