Agatha Christie Quotations | Page 3

you cannot give to people what they are incapable of receiving.

The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation.

I suppose without curiosity a man would be a tortoise. Very comfortable life, a tortoise has.

Oh, no, I'm not brave. When a thing is certain, there's nothing to be brave about. All you can do is to find your consolation.

You travel life has the aspect of a dream. It is something outside the normal, yet you are in it. It is peopled with characters you have never seen before and in all probability will never see again. It brings occasional homesickness, and loneliness, and pangs of longing ... But you are like the Vikings who have gone into a world of adventure, and home is not home until you return.

I can think of nothing more soul destroying in life than to persist in trying to do a thing you want desperately to do well, and to know that you are at the best second rate.

Every man should have aunts. They illustrate the triumph of guess work over logic.

Assumptions are dangerous things.

I've got an uncle myself. Nobody should be held responsible for their uncles. Nature's little throwbacks - that's how I look at it.

The urge to write one's autobiography, so I have been told, overtakes everyone sooner or later.

In my end is my beginning - that's what people are always saying. But what does it mean?

I've got a stomach now as well as a behind. And I mean - well, you can't pull it in both ways, can you? ... I've made it a rule to pull in my stomach and let my behind look after itself.

If anyone is really determined to lend you a book, you never can get out of it!

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.

If you've had a happy childhood, nobody can take that away from you ...

More children suffer from interference than from non-interference.

Wonderful things, horses. Never know what they will do, or won't do.

there is no fanatic like a religious fanatic.

Ideas are like everything else. They've got to be marketed.

The out-of-date returns in due course as the picturesque.

Nurses - nurses, you'm all the same. Full of cheerfulness over other people's troubles.

The truth often does sound unconvincing.

One place is very like another.

The whole thing was like a nine-month ocean voyage to which you never got acclimatized.

Does the real thing ever have the perfection of a stage performance?

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

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.

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

Everything has got its right size. When it is its right size and well run it's the tops.

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

Surfing is like that. You are either vigorously cursing or else you are idiotically pleased with yourself.

Those who never think of money need a great deal of it.

the science of tomorrow is the supernatural of today.

Never worry about what you say to a man. They're so conceited that they never believe you mean it if it's unflattering.

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.

Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.

lawyers never go to law, do they? They know better.

How often have I not heard a perfectly intelligent female says, in the tone of one clinching an argument, 'Edgar says -- ' And all the time you are perfectly aware that Edgar is a perfect fool.

You can only really get under anybody's skin if you are married to them.

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

Many friends have said to me, 'I never know when you write your books, because I've never seen you writing, or even seen you go away to write.' I must behave rather as dogs do when they retire with a bone; they depart in a secretive manner and you do not see them again for an odd half hour. They return self-consciously with mud on their noses. I do much the same.

Of course I despise money when I haven't got any. It's the only dignified thing to do.

There are doubtless certain unworldly people who are indifferent to money. I myself have never met one.

I can't imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author's business to write, not talk.

The supernatural is only the natural of which the laws are not yet understood.

In my experience, people who go about looking for trouble usually find it.

Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?

Bad temper is its own safety valve. He who can bark does not bite.

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

I've a theory that one can always get anything one wants if one will pay the price. And do you know what the price is, nine times out of ten? Compromise.

Juliet singles out Romeo. Desdemona claims Othello. They have no doubts, the young, no fear, no pride.

Three months seems to me quite a reasonable time to complete a book, if one can get right down to it.

What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions.

There are questions that you don't ask because you're afraid of the answers to them.

Doctors can do almost anything nowadays, can't they, unless they kill you while they're trying to cure you.

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.

The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She is safe, but not sound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first - safety; sanctification gives us the second - soundness.

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.

God bless my soul, woman, the more personal you are the better! This is a story of human beings - not dummies! Be personal - be prejudiced - be catty - be anything you please! Write the thing your own way. We can always prune out the bits that are libellous afterwards!

Self-preservation's a man's first duty. And natives don't mind dying, you know. They don't feel about it as Europeans do.

There is no question of defence. I have always acted in accordance with the dictates of my conscience. I have nothing with which to reproach myself.

You regard it as impossible that a sinner should be struck down by the wrath of God! I do not!

You'll be glad too, when the end comes.

I'm afraid of death... Yes, but that doesn't stop death coming...

She didn't give George any too easy a time when she was alive. She was one of those semi-invalids. I believe she had really something wrong with her. But whatever it was she played it for all it was worth. She was capricious, exacting and unreasonable. She complained from morning to night. George was expected to wait on her, hand and foot and everything he did was always wrong and he got cursed for it. Most men, I'm fully convinced, would have hit her with a hatchet long ago.

Youth is a failing only too easily outgrown.

To feel admiration for a man all through one's married life would, I think, be excessively tedious.

"I think you're begging the question," said Haydock, "and I can see looming ahead one of those terrible exercises in probability where six men have white hats and six men have black hats and you have to work it out by mathematics how likely it is that the hats will get mixed up and in what proportion. If you start thinking about things like that, you would go round the bend. Let me assure you of that!"

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.

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.

It's very inconvenient to be loved. Nearly everyone has found that out, sooner or later. The fewer people who love you the less you will have to suffer.

Is there ever any particular spot where one can put one's finger and say, "It all began that day, at such a time and such a place, with such an incident?

From an early age I knew very strongly the lust to kill...

There is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation!... A human being, Hastings, cannot resist theopportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.

I, myself, was always recognized . . . as the “slow one” in the family. It was quite true, and I knew it and accepted it. Writing and spelling were always terribly difficult for me. My letters were without originality. I was . . . an extraordinarily bad speller and have remained so until this day.

I know nothing about pistols and revolvers, which is why I usually kill off my characters with a blunt instrument or better with poisons. Besides, poisons are neat and clean and really exciting... I do not think I could look a really ghastly mangled body in the face. It is the means that I am interested in. I do not usually describe the end, which is often a corpse.

And if you cast down an idol, there's nothing left.

A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world.

I have a certain experience of the way people tell lies.

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

I always take abroad with me one really good soft pillow--to me it makes all the difference between comfort and misery.

It's not a man's working hours that are important--it's his leisure hours. That's the mistake we all make.

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.

... it's always interesting when one doesn't see. If you don't see what a thing means, you must be looking at it wrong way round.

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.

Men don't understand how their mannerisms can get on women's nerves so that you feel you just have to snap.

Hate doesn't last. Love does.

Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.

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!

... 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.

Desperate ills need desperate remedies.

Love is not everything ... It is only when we are young that we think it is.

If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.

... nothing is so boring as devotion.

My remarks are, as always, apt, sound, and to the point. (Hercule Poirot)

One does what one can, not what one cannot.

To count - really and truly to count - a woman must have goodness or brains.

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.

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!

It's no good starting out by thinking one is a heaven-born genius- some people are, but very few. No, one is a tradesman - a tradesman in a good honest trade. You must learn the technical skills, and then, within that trade, you can apply your own creative ideas, but you must submit them to the discipline of form.