“I like to see an angry Englishman,” said Poirot. “They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.”
Source: Murder on the Orient Express (1934)
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Agatha Christie 320
English mystery and detective writer 1890–1976Related quotes

1977 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEWsxCrMM1U in Pitkin County Prison, Colorado

“Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”

“Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.”
As quoted in With Truth as Our Sword (2005) by C E Sylvester, p. 205

Source: Leviathan Wakes (2011), Chapter 17 (pp. 178-179)

Remarks after the Solvay Conference (1927)
Context: I feel very much like Dirac: the idea of a personal God is foreign to me. But we ought to remember that religion uses language in quite a different way from science. The language of religion is more closely related to the language of poetry than to the language of science. True, we are inclined to think that science deals with information about objective facts, and poetry with subjective feelings. Hence we conclude that if religion does indeed deal with objective truths, it ought to adopt the same criteria of truth as science. But I myself find the division of the world into an objective and a subjective side much too arbitrary. The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won't get us very far.

Murder for Christmas (1939, Holiday for Murder, Hercule Poirot’s Christmas)