Agatha Christie Quotes

377 Sourced Quotes

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

Agatha Christie
All women, without in the least meaning it, consider every man they meet as a possible husband for themselves or for their best friend.

Agatha Christie
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...

Agatha Christie
I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then - I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn't, luckily, have to bother about that.

Agatha Christie
Sitting here with one's knitting, one just sees the facts. -"The Blood-Stained Pavement

Agatha Christie
The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself - and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.

Agatha Christie
But how much are the delicate convolutions of the brain influenced by the digestive apparatus? When the mal de mere seizes me I, Hercule Poirot, am a creature with no grey cells, no order, no method — a mere member of the human race somewhere below average intelligence!

Agatha Christie
The English are very stupid, said Poirot. They think that they can deceive anyone but that no one can deceive them.

Agatha Christie
Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.

Agatha Christie
You give too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

Agatha Christie
I like to inquire into everything. Hercule Poirot is a good dog. The good dog follows the scent, and if, regrettably, there is no scent to follow, he noses around — seeking always something that is not very nice.

Agatha Christie
Where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worries and only half the royalties.

Agatha Christie
A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.

Agatha Christie
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairing, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

Agatha Christie
At my time of life, one knows that the worst is usually true.

Agatha Christie
Because, Renisenb, it is so easy and it costs so little labour to write down ten bushels of barley, or a hundred head of cattle, or ten fields of spelt - and the thing that is written will come to seem like the real thing, and so the writer and the scribe will come to despise the man who ploughs the fields and reaps the barley and raises the cattle - but all the same the fields and the cattle are real - they are not just marks of inks on papyrus. And when all the records and all the papyrus rolls are destroyed and the scribes are scattered, the men who toil and reap will go on, and Egypt will still live.

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

Agatha Christie
I am not very clever about Americanisms—and I understand they change very quickly.

Agatha Christie
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. A beastly thing, compromise, but it steals upon you as you near middle age. It's stealing upon me now. To get the woman I want I'd — I'd even take up regular work.

Agatha Christie
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.

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

Agatha Christie
Oh, I'm not afraid of death! What have I got to live for after all? I suppose you believe it's very wrong to kill a person who has injured you-even if they've taken away everything you had in the world?

Agatha Christie
There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.

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

Agatha Christie
Like most Englishmen, he felt something strongly, and proceeded to muddle around until he had, somehow or other, cleared up the mess.

Agatha Christie
How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think.

Agatha Christie
When you find that people are not telling you the truth—look out!

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
I was wrong about that young man of yours. 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. Now, whenever that young man looked at you he looked like a sheep. I take back all I said this morning. It is genuine.

Agatha Christie
I did not deceive you, mon ami. At most, I permitted you to deceive yourself.

Agatha Christie