Agatha Christie Quotes

page 5

““You do well. Method and order, they are everything,” replied Poirot.”

“Mrs. Oliver in her own opinion was famous for her intuition. One intuition succeeded another with remarkable rapidity, and Mrs. Oliver always claimed the right to justify the particular intuition which turned out to be right!”

“In my end is my beginning — that's what people are always saying. But what does it mean? And just where does my story begin? I must try and think…”

“On the seat opposite him was an American tourist. The pattern of his clothes, of his overcoat, the grip he carried, down to his hopeful friendliness and his naïve absorption in the scenery, even the guidebook in his hand, all gave him away and proclaimed him a small town American seeing Europe for the first time. In another minute or so, Poirot judged, he would break into speech. His wistful dog-like expression could not be mistaken.”

“Oh, dear, it's quite true what Dr. Reilly said. How does one stop writing? If I could find a really good telling phrase… Like the one M. Poirot used. In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate… Something like that.”

“These little things are very significant.”

“Flattery, in Tuppence’s opinion, should always be laid on with a trowel where a man is concerned.”

“Truth of it is,’ said Commander Haydock, steering rather erratically round a one-way island and narrowly missing collision with a large van, ‘when the beggars are right, one remembers it, and when they’re wrong you forget it.”

“John, forgive me… for what I can't help doing.”

“An Englishman thinks first of his work — his job, he calls it — and then of his sport, and last — a good way last — of his wife.”

“It was a very British and utterly unconvincing performance.”

“It would be difficult Bland thought, to forget Hercule Poirot, and this not entirely for complimentary reasons.”

“I can imagine anything! That's the trouble with me. I can imagine things now — this minute. I could even make them sound all right, but of course none of them would be true.”

“Précisément! The body — the cage — is everything of the most respectable — but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.”

“"I saw a particular personage and I threatened him — yes, Mademoiselle, I, Hercule Poirot, threatened him."
"With the police?"
"No," said Poirot drily, "With the Press — a much more deadly weapon."”

“Tout de même, it is not necessary that he should be killed on the Orient Express. There are other places.”

“Men are foolish, are they not, Mademoiselle? To eat, to drink, to breathe the good air, it is a very pleasant thing, Mademoiselle. One is foolish to leave all that simply because one has no money — or because the heart aches. L´amour, it causes many fatalities, does it not?”

“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.”

“Yes, my friend,’ he said. ‘It is so easy to be an American — here in Paris! A nasal voice — the chewing gum — the little goatee — the horned-rimmed spectacles — all the appurtenances of the stage American…”

“Let us think only of the good days that are to come.”

“It’s so dreadfully easy — killing people… And you begin to feel that it doesn’t matter… That it’s only you that matters! It’s dangerous — that.”

“The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided. Nevertheless, in view of the world-wide notoriety which attended it, I have been asked, both by my friend Poirot and the family themselves, to write an account of the whole story. This, we trust, will effectually silence the sensational rumours which still persist.”

“Ah, my friend, one may live in a big house and yet have no comfort.”

“It merely confirmed in him his long-held belief that you should never believe anything anyone said without first checking it. Suspect everybody, had been for many years, if not his whole life, one of his first axioms.”

“I don't think I shall ever forget my first sight of Hercule Poirot. Of course, I got used to him later on, but to begin with it was a shock, and I think everyone else must have felt the same! I don't know what I'd imagined — something like Sherlock Holmes — […] Of course, I knew he was a foreigner, but I hadn't expected him to be quite as foreign as he was, if you know what I mean. When you saw him you just wanted to laugh! He was like something on the stage or at the pictures. […] He looked like a hairdresser in a comic play!”

“And Mr. Burnaby said acutely: "Well, it doesn't seem to have done her much good, poor lass." But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr. Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.”

““This affair must all be unravelled from within.” He tapped his forehead. “These little grey cells. It is ‘up to them’ — as you say over here.””

“It’s not impossible my dear. It’s just a very remarkable coincidence — and remarkable coincidences do happen.”

“I agree with you. It is here a family affair. It is a poison that works in the blood — it is intimate — it is deep-seated. There is here, I think, hate and knowledge…”

“Tout de même,” said Poirot, “since I cannot find anything, eh bien, then the logic falls out of the window.”

“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 have often noticed that being a devoted wife saps the intellect,’ murmured Tommy.”

“She shrugged her shoulders slightly.
“What can one do?”
“You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.””

““You have been to the Riviera before, Georges?” said Poirot to his valet the following morning.
George was an intensely English, rather wooden-faced individual.
“Yes, sir. I was here two years ago when I was in the service of Lord Edward Frampton.”
“And to-day,” murmured his master, “you are here with Hercule Poirot. How one mounts in the world!””

“The rottenness comes from within.”

“I don't pretend to be an author or to know anything about writing. I'm doing this simply because Dr Reilly asked me to, and somehow when Dr Reilly asks you to do a thing you don't like to refuse.”

“It shows you, Madame, the dangers of conversation. It is a profound belief of mine that if you can induce a person to talk to you for long enough, on any subject whatever, sooner or later they will give themselves away.”

“I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them.”

“Murder isn’t — it really isn’t — a thing to tamper with lightheartedly.”

““It makes me madder than a hornet to be disbelieved,” she explained.”

“Men always tell such silly lies.”

“"I have made my choice, Hori. I will share my life with you for good or evil, until death comes…" With his arms round her, with the sudden new sweetness of his face against hers, she was filled with an exultant richness of living.”

“They have, all of them, such wonderful good manners. Not taught good manners — the natural thing. I could never have believed till I came here that natural courtesy could be such a wonderful — such a positive thing.”

“I think perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to read aloud Gibbon to me in the evenings, because if it’s nice and hot by the fire, there’s something about Gibbon that does, rather, make you go to sleep.”

“Harold Waring, like many other Englishmen, was a bad linguist.”

“"You know that in all tombs there is always a false door?"
Renisenb stared. "Yes, of course."
"Well, people are like that too. They create a false door - to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority - and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is a bare rock … And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth - their true self reasserts itself."”

“What beats me — it always does — is how a man can be so clever and yet be such a perfect fool.”

“Yes, a private investigator like my Wilbraham Rice. The public have taken very strongly to Wilbraham Rice. He bites his nails and eats a lot of bananas. I don’t know why I made him bite his nails to start with — it’s really rather disgusting — but there it is. He started by biting his nails, and now he has to do it in every single book. So monotonous.”

“Now there is no murder without a motive.”