Agatha Christie
Once I went professionally to an archaeological expedition-and I learnt something there. In the course of an excavation, when something comes up out of the ground, everything is cleared away very carefully all around it. You take away the loose earth, and you scrape here and there with a knife until finally your object is there, all alone, ready to be drawn and photographed with no extraneous matter confusing it. That is what I have been seeking to do-clear away the extraneous matter so that we can see the truth-the naked shining truth.Collection: Knives
But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.Collection: Innocent Person
If you've had a happy childhood, nobody can take that away from you.Collection: Childhood
If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.Collection: Thinking
Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.Collection: Ideas
Jealousy, you know, is usually not an affair of causes. It is much more-how shall I say?-fundamental than that. Based on the knowledge that one's love is not returned. And so one goes on waiting, watching, expecting...that the loved one will turn to someone else.Collection: Love Is
There are some people who don't conform to the signals. An ordinary well-regulated locomotive slows down or pulls up when it sees the red light hoisted against it. Perhaps I was born color blind. When I see the red signal -- I can't help forging ahead. And in the end, you know, that spells disaster.Collection: Light
I always take abroad with me one really good soft pillow--to me it makes all the difference between comfort and misery.Collection: Differences
In old days the public didn't really mind much about accuracy, but nowadays readers take it upon themselves to write to authors on every possible occasion, pointing out flaws.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Facts
The trouble with you and me, is that we don't live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.Collection: Dream
To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but at the same time, Elinor, one would not be without experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived.Collection: Joy
Does the real thing ever have the perfection of a stage performance?Collection: Real
If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it - often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.Collection: Surprise
It's a mystery to me how anyone ever gets any nourishment in this place. They must eat their meals standing up by the window so as to be sure of not missing anything.Collection: Missing
An ugly voice repels me where an ugly face would not.Collection: Voice
I am all that there is of the most real.Collection: Real
You should employ your little grey cells.Collection: Cells
... the belief in a superstratum of human beings ... is the most evil of all beliefs. For when you say, 'I am not as other men' -- you have lost the two most valuable qualities we have ever tried to attain: -- humility and brotherhood.Collection: Humility
From an early age I knew very strongly the lust to kill.Collection: Lust
There are many things that are unbelievable. Especially before breakfast, is it not? That is what one of your classics says. Six impossible things before breakfast.Collection: Impossible Things
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!Collection: Girl
I am not mad. I am eccentric perhaps--at least certain people say so; but as regards my profession. I am very much as one says, 'all there.Collection: People
Talk and tea is his specialty," said Giles. "He has about five cups of tea a day. But he works splendidly when we are looking.Collection: Tea
Speech ... is an invention of man's to prevent him from thinking.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Mean
Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.Collection: Liars
To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Oysters
Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm, but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack - not kindness, they have kindness - but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She though always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.Collection: Kindness
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.Collection: Fighting
Who are you? You don't belong to the police?' 'I am better than the police,' said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.Collection: Simple
A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can't help looking like a sheep.Collection: Men
how tedious is retirement! You cannot imagine to yourself the monotony with which day comes after day.Collection: Retirement
I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Years
Life itself is an unsolved mystery", said the clergyman gravely.Collection: Mystery
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.Collection: Information
What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one's house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean.Collection: Mean
Difficulties are made to be overcome ~ Miss Felicity Lemon, Agatha Christie's Poirot: The Plymouth ExpressCollection: Missing
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.Collection: Things In Life
if you ask me, nobody really likes people who are always doing their duty.Collection: People
Who is there who has not felt a sudden startled pang at reliving an old experience or feeling an old emotion?Collection: Feelings
The supernatural is only the natural of which the laws are not yet understood.Collection: Law
You've a pretty good nerve," said Ratchett. "Will twenty thousand dollars tempt you?" It will not." If you're holding out for more, you won't get it. I know what a thing's worth to me." I, also M. Ratchett." What's wrong with my proposition?" Poirot rose. "If you will forgive me for being personal - I do not like your face, M. Ratchett," he said.Collection: Rose
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.Collection: Real
The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Hands
One of us in this very room is in fact the murderer.Collection: Facts