Agatha Christie Quotes

377 Sourced Quotes

Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective.

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
To keep something wild is far more difficult than to preserve it.

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
Courage is the resolution to face the unforeseen.

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
There is something about conscious tact that is very irritating.

Agatha Christie
'I have often noticed that being a devoted wife saps the intellect,' murmured Tommy.

Agatha Christie
I don't go in for being sorry for people. For one thing it's insulting. One is only sorry for people if they are sorry for themselves. Self-pity is the biggest stumbling block in our world today.

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

Agatha Christie
I'm not often bored,' I assured her. "Life's not long enough for that.

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
Poirot twinkled at her gently.

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
Mr. Jesmond made a peculiar noise rather like a hen who has decided to lay an egg and then thought better of it.

Agatha Christie
Downstairs in the lounge, by the third pillar from the left, there sits an old lady with a sweet, placid, spinsterish face and a mind that has plumbed the depths of human iniquity and taken it all as in the day's work....where crime is concerned, she's the goods.

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
Let us think only of the good days that are to come.

Agatha Christie
If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, they usually admit it—often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.

Agatha Christie
He was one of those staunch patriotic Britons who, having made a portion of a foreign country their own, strongly resent the original inhabitants of it.

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

Agatha Christie
Very unfortunately, she had no husband. She had never had a husband, and therefore did not kill a husband.

Agatha Christie
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.

Agatha Christie
Poirot said placidly, One does not, you know, employ merely the muscles. I do not need to bend and measure the footprints and pick up the cigarette ends and examine the bent blades of grass. It is enough for me to sit back in my chair and think. It is this – he tapped his egg-shaped head – this, that functions!

Agatha Christie
See you, one should not ask for outside proof—no, reason should be enough. But the flesh is weak, it is consolation to find that one is on the right track.

Agatha Christie
Do you always travel first-class, Mr. Hardman?
Yes, sir. The firm pays my travelling expenses.
He winked.

Agatha Christie
'If one approaches a problem with order and method there should be no difficulty in solving it — none whatever,' said Pirot severely.

Agatha Christie
The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes.

Agatha Christie
'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.'

Agatha Christie
Without interest (hers not the type to wonder why!) but with perfect efficiently, Miss Lemon had fulfilled her task.

Agatha Christie