Vous eprouves trop d'emotion, Hastings, It affects your hands and your wits. Is that a way to fold a coat? And regard what you have done to my pyjamas. If the hairwash breaks what will befall them?' 'Good heavens, Poirot,' I cried, 'this is a matter of life and death. What does it matter what happens to our clothes?' 'You have no sense of proportion Hastings. We cannot catch a train earlier than the time that it leaves, and to ruin one's clothes will not be the least helpful in preventing a murder.

In old days the public didn't really mind much about accuracy, but nowadays readers take it upon themselves to write to authors on every possible occasion, pointing out flaws.

It's what's in *yourself* that makes you happy or unhappy.

... nothing is so boring as devotion.

Exactly! It is absurd - improbable - it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.

There is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation!... A human being, Hastings, cannot resist theopportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.

I've always noticed that if you speak the truth in a rather silly way nobody believes you.