01c. 1933 ADMaybe it is because I am an old man, but I find, M. Poirot, that there is something about the defenselessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless - so sure. So generous and so demanding.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
02c. 1933 ADHe felt a strange pang. It was, perhaps, the fault of old Mr Jonathan, speaking of Juliet... No Juliet here - unless perhaps one could imagine Juliet a survivor - living on, deprived of Romeo... Was it not an essential part of Juliet's make-up that that she should die young?Agatha Christie / quote ↗
03c. 1933 ADJuliet singles out Romeo. Desdemona claims Othello. They have no doubts, the young, no fear, no pride.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
04c. 1933 ADWho was there to guard youth from pain and death - youth who could not, who had never been able to, guard itself? Did they know too little? Or was it that they knew too much, and therefore thought they knew it all?Agatha Christie / quote ↗
05c. 1933 ADIt has been my experience, that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
06c. 1933 AD...But even then you have to reckon with a criminal's chief vice.''What is that?'' Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
07c. 1933 ADSitting here, literally amongst the dead, reckoning up gains and losses, casting accounts, I have come to see gains that cannot be reckoned in terms of wealth, and losses that are more damaging than loss of a crop... I look at the River and I see the lifeblood of Egypt that has existed before we lived and that will exist after we die... Life and death, Renisenb, are not of such great account.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
08c. 1933 ADThought is yours only. Nobody can alter or influence the use you mean to make of it.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
09c. 1933 ADYou are the patient one, Mademoiselle,' said Poirot to Miss Debenham.She shrugged her shoulders slightly. 'What else can one do?'You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.'That implies a detached attitude. I think my attitude is more selfish. I have learned to save myself useless emotion.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
10c. 1933 ADMiss Howard: Like a good detective story myself. Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last Chapter. Everyone dumbfounded. Real crime - you'd know at once.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
11c. 1933 ADThe Roar of the engine penetrated through Bertram's Hotel from the street outside. Colonel Luscombe perceived that Ladislaus Malinowski was one of Elvira's heroes. "Well," he thought to himself, "better than one of those pop singers or crooners or long-haired Beatles or whatever they called themselves." Luscombe was old-fashioned in his views of young men.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
12c. 1933 ADShe breathed an enormous sigh, looked at Poirot, Looked away, and suddenly blurted out, "You're too old. Nobody told me you were so old. I really don't want to be rude but - there it is. You're too old. I'm really sorry." She turned abruptly and blundered out of the room, rather like a desperate moth in lamplight. Poirot, his mouth open, heard the bang of the front door. He ejaculated: "Non d'un nom d'un nom...Agatha Christie / quote ↗
13c. 1933 ADThe great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
14c. 1933 ADI think people more often kill those they love than those they hate. Possible because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
15c. 1933 ADHer sleep was enlivened by several dreams. One where Professor Wanstead's bushy eyebrows fell off because they were not his own eyebrows, but false ones. As she woke again, her first impression was that which often follows dreams, a belief that the dream in question had solved everything. 'Of course,' she thought, 'of course!' His eyebrows were false and that solved the whole thing. He was the criminal.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
16c. 1933 ADIf Hori were to die, I should not forget! Hori is a song in my heart for ever... That means-that there is no more death...Agatha Christie / quote ↗
17c. 1933 ADI like a good detective story," he said. "But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The story begins long before that—years before sometimes with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
18c. 1933 ADIt's all very well to talk like that,” said Mr. Rafiel. “We, you say? What do you think I can do about it? I can't even walk without help. How can you and I set about preventing a murder? You're about a hundred and I'm a broken-up old crock.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
19c. 1933 ADIt is romantic, yes,’ agreed Hercule Poirot. ‘It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun’.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
20c. 1933 ADA susceptible child is capable of great hero worship, and a young mind can easily be obsessed by an idea which persists into adult life.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
21c. 1933 ADI know there's a proverb which that says 'To err is human,' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
22c. 1933 ADWhen he passed me in the restaurant," he said at last, "I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal – an animal savage, but savage! you understand – had passed me by.""And yet he looked altogether of the most respectable.""Précisément! The body – the cage – is everything of the most respectable – but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.""You are fanciful, mon vieux," said M. Bouc. "It may be so. But I could not rid myself of the impression that evil had passed me by very close." (1.2.52-56)Agatha Christie / quote ↗
23c. 1933 ADThe eye is diverted from the real business, it is caught by the spectacular action that means nothing--nothing at all.Agatha Christie / quote ↗
