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.

Of course I despise money when I haven't got any. It's the only dignified thing to do.

As you yourself have said, what other explanation can there be?' Poirot stared straight ahead of him. 'That is what I ask myself,' he said. 'That is what I never cease to ask myself.

Every man should have aunts. They illustrate the triumph of guess work over logic.

I have wanted . . . to commit a murder myself. I recognized this as the desire of the artist to express himself! . . . But-incongruous as it may seem to some-I was restrained and hampered by my innate sense of justice. The innocent must not suffer.

The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She is safe, but not sound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first - safety; sanctification gives us the second - soundness.

Poirot said placidly, “One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this – ” he tapped his egg-shaped head – “this, that functions!