Agatha Christie Quotes

If you are to be Hercule Poirot, you must think of everything.

Evil is not something superhuman, it's something less than human.

An appreciative listener is always stimulating.

Why shouldn't I hate her? She did the worst thing to me that anyone can do to anyone else. Let them believe that they're loved and wanted and then show them that it's all a sham.

I'm going to marry him. And if he thinks he can get divorced and married every two or three years in the approved Hollywood fashion, well, he never made a bigger mistake in his life. He's going to marry and stick to me.

That was what, ultimately, war did to you. It was not the physical dangers--the mines at sea, the bombs from the air, the crisp ping of a rifle bullet as you drove over a desert track. No, it was the spiritual danger of learning how much easier life was if you ceased to think.

With thought, all problems can be resolved.

Writers are diffident creatures -- they need encouragement.

To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.

Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!

"Look here," I said, "people like to collect disasters."

Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.

Ah, but life is like that! It does not permit you to arrange and order it as you will. It will not permit you to escape emotion, to live by the intellect and by reason! You cannot say, 'I will feel so much and no more.' Life, Mr. Welman, whatever else it is, is not reasonable. [Hercule Poirot]

Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.

When the sea goes down, there will come from the mainland boats and men. And they will find ten dead bodies and an unsolved problem on Indian Island.

He was very much a man of moods, possibly owing to what is styled the artistic temperment. I have never seen, myself, why the possession of artistic ability should be supposed to excuse a man from a decent exercise of self-control.

I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.

... there are many to whom money has no personal appeal, but who can be tempted by the power it confers.

... obsessions are always dangerous.

I really cannot understand the point of what you're saying. Really,' said Clotilde, looking at her. 'What a very extraordinary person you are. What sort of a woman are you? Why are you talking like this? Who are you?' Miss Marple pulled down the mass of pink wool that encircled her head, a pink wool scarf of the same kind that she had once worn in the West Indies. 'One of my names,' she said, 'is Nemesis.' 'Nemesis? And what does that mean?' 'I think you know,' said Miss Marple. 'You are a very well educated woman. Nemesis is long delayed sometimes, but it comes in the end.

I did not deceive you, mon ami. At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself.

I have always admired the Esquimaux (Eskimos). One fine day a delicious meal is cooked for dear old mother, and then she goes walking away over the ice, and doesn't come back.

There hung about her the restrained energy of a whiplash.

The point is that one's got an instinct to live. One doesn't live because one's reason assents to living. People who, as we say, 'would be better dead' don't want to die! People who apparently have everything to live for just let themselves fade out of life because they haven't got the energy to fight.

I am all that there is of the most real.

... nothing is so boring as devotion.

Everybody always knows something," said Adam, "even if it's something they don't know they know.

Achievement brings with it its own anticlimax.

It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely. (Hercule Poirot)

These little grey cells. It is up to them.

One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.

When engaged in eating, the brain should be the servant of the stomach.

Hercule Poirot: I am an imbecile. I see only half of the picture. Miss Lemon: I don't even see that.

You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.

Fear is incomplete knowledge.

Speech ... is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.