Quotes by Agatha Christie

One may live in a big house and yet have no comfort.

The difference between being in a relationship and being in prison is that in prisons they let you play softball on the weekends.

No, my friend, I am not drunk. I have just been to the dentist, and need not return for another six months! Is it not the most beautiful thought?

The first time you do a thing is always exciting.

Family strength is a marvellous thing.

The young people think that the old people are fools; but the old people know that the young people are fools!

Desperate ills need desperate remedies.

It is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.

To get at the cause for a thing, we must study the effect.

A man in love is an awful sight.

We all have the little grey cells. And so few of us know how to use them.

Bitterness leads nowhere. It turns back on itself. It is the eternal cul-de-sac.

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.

If you wish to catch a rabbit you put a ferret into the hole, and if the rabbit is there he runs.

He never left the cinema very quickly. It always took him a moment or two to return to the prosaic reality of everyday life.

I am in my own line a celebrated person--I may say a most celebrated person. My gifts, in fact, are unequalled!

The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.

You do not like anyone less because they have tuberculosis or some other fatal disease.

I mean that success has come early. And that is dangerous. Always dangerous.

You know, Emily was a selfish old woman in her way. She was very generous, but she always wanted a return. She never let people forget what she had done for them -- and, that way she missed love.

Youth is a failing only too
easily outgrown.

The young people think the old people are fools -- but the old people know the young people are fools.

A great man always knows better than to explain unless an explanation is demanded. To rush into explanations and excuses is always a sign of weakness.

You should employ your little grey cells.

Beneath her self-control, though he did not guess it, was the impatience of the keen brain watching a slower brain laboriously cover the ground it had already traversed in a flash.

Fire in her eyes, ice in her voice.

It is curious -- but you cannot make a revolution without honest men. ... Every revolution has had its honest men. They are soon disposed of afterwards.

More children suffer from interference than from non-interference.

She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.

Poirot: Do not allow Hate into your heart, for it will make a home there.

Jackie: If Love cannot live there, Hate works just as well.

The truth must be quite plain, if one could just clear away the litter.

But his face should really inspire you with confidence, my dear lady. No self-respecting murderer would ever consent to look like one. Crippen now, I believe was one of the pleasantest fellows imaginable.

In the midst of life, we are in death.

That is why most great love stories are tragedies.

How tedious is retirement! You cannot imagine to yourself the monotony with which day comes after day.

Poirot thought it not quite professional to begin a routine working day before ten.

A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves.

All the same, lots of women buy their clothes in Paris, and have not, on that account, necessarily poisoned their husbands.

Mr Rycroft said nothing. It was so difficult not to say the wrong thing to Captain Wyatt that it was usually safer not to reply at all.

It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.

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.

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 die.

Thought is yours only. Nobody can alter or influence the use you mean to make of it.

It takes so little to undermine public confidence in a man.

Real evidence is usually vague and unsatisfactory. It has to be examined -- -sifted. But here the whole thing is cut and dried. No, my friend, this evidence has been very cleverly manufactured -- -so cleverly that it has defeated its own ends.

Evil never goes unpunished, Monsieur. But the punishment is sometimes secret.

Why harrow oneself by looking on the worst side?... Because it is sometimes necessary.

The trouble is, that this sort of things once it starts, grows.

We are the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then.

Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.

From now on, it is our task to suspect each and everyone amongst us. Forewarned is forearmed. Take no risks and be alert to danger. That is all.

If only-if only, Hastings, you would part your hair in the middle instead of at the side! What a difference it would make to the symmetry of your appearance. And your moustache. If you must have a moustache, let it be a real moustache-a thing of beauty such as mine.

There is something about conscious tact that is very irritating.

They have a genius, young ladies, for getting into various kinds of trouble and difficulty.

I should hope so. But, my dear, I do beg of you to guard your tongue and be careful of what you say. These women are singularly deficient in humour, remember, and take everything seriously.

To marry and have children, that is the common lot of women. Only one woman in a hundred -- more, in a thousand, can make for herself a name and position as you have done.

I know enough of life to know that you can never judge any case on its outside merits.

Nature repeats herself more than one would imagine. The sea has infinitely more variety.

Any medical man who predicts exactly when a patient will die, or exactly how long he will live, is bound to make a fool of himself. The human factor is always incalculable. The weak have often unexpected powers of resistance, the strong sometimes succumb.

I think I said that every generation had its weaklings -- that that was one of the penalties of greatness -- but that their failings were seldom remembered by posterity.

Too much safety is abhorrent to the nature of a human being.

Put that in your mustache and smoke it.

The things young women read nowadays and profess to enjoy positively frighten me.

He used deliberation as others use quickness of repartee.

Meanwhile we have learnt something, and to know is to be prepared.

A rich man and his money are not so easily parted. Me, I have seen a well-known millionaire turn out a tramful of people to seek for a dropped halfpenny.

Authors were shy, unsociable creatures, atoning for their lack of social aptitude by inventing their own companions and conversations.

An appreciative listener is always stimulating.

Do you mean to tell me, Superintendent, that this is one of those damned cases you get in detective stories where a man is killed in a locked room by some apparently supernatural agency.

Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter.

You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.

You surprise me, Hastings. Do you not know that all celebrated detectives have brothers who would be even more celebrated than they are were it not for constitutional indolence?

Beastly things, teeth. Give us trouble from the cradle to the grave.

Besides a burial service is rather lovely. Makes you feel uplifted, the grief is real. It makes you feel awful but it does something to you. I mean, it works it out like perspiration.

And, of course, afterwards -- one always hears these things afterwards, so much better if one heard them before -- we found out that dozens of empty brandy bottles were taken out of the house every week!

Because I am Hercule Poirot, I do not need to be told.

Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact.

Marriage is an extraordinary thing -- and I doubt if any outsider -- even a child of the marriage -- has the right to judge.

One must accept the fact that we have only one companion in this world, a companion who accompanies us from the cradle to the grave -- our own self. Get on good terms with that companion -- learn to live with yourself.

I married an archeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.

Well, you know, bigamy is bigamy.

A lot of trouble has been caused by memoirs. Indiscreet revelations, that sort of thing. People who have been close as an oyster all their lives seem positively to relish causing trouble when they themselves shall be comfortably dead.

I continued to do arithmetic with my father, passing proudly through fractions to decimals. I eventually arrived at the point where so many cows ate so much grass, and tanks filled with water in so many hours. I found it quite enthralling.

I thought the Chief Constable was going to have apoplexy.

All I needed was a steady table and a typewriter...a marble-topped bedroom washstand table made a good place; the dining-room table between meals was also suitable.

I just woke up feeling happy this morning. You know those days when everything in the world seems right.

I have often had occasion to notice how, where a direct question would fail to elicit a response, a false assumption brings instant information in the form of a contradiction.

Use that fluff of yours you call a brain.

And so could you know it if you would only use the brains the good God has given you. Sometimes I really am tempted to believe that by inadvertence, He passed you by.

Mr. Jesmond made a peculiar noise rather like a hen who has decided to lay an egg and then thought better of it.

Vi pripadate Ligi naroda?
-Ja pripadam cijelom svijetu, madame, reče Poirot dramatično.

He was a man of whom nearly everybody was a little afraid. Why this last was so can hardly be stated in definite words. There was a feeling, perhaps, that he knew a little too much about everybody. And there was a feeling, too, that his sense of humor was a curious one.

But when you say crazy, that describes very well what the general appearance may be to ordinary, everyday people.

And how do you know that these fine begonias are not of equal importance?

The two words expressed volumes.

Eh bien, then, you are crazy, or appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you may be crazy.