Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Women, however charming, have this disadvantage: they distract the mind from food!”

— Agatha Christie

452. “Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide.”

— Agatha Christie

453. “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

454. “Whether he acted rightly or not, I have never been sure. It was the future of a child that was at stake. A child, he felt, ought to be given the benefit of a doubt.”

— Agatha Christie

455. “Sometimes what you think is an end is only a beginning. And that wouldn’t do at all.”

— Agatha Christie

456. “Hate doesn’t last. Love does.”

— Agatha Christie

457. “If only father would be decent and die, I should be all right.”

— Agatha Christie

458. “My good Japp, is it possible that you throw the mud in my eyes? I know well enough that it is the Chinaman you suspect. But you are so artful. You want me to help you – and yet you drag the red kipper across the trail.”

— Agatha Christie

459. “Eve. The Lee family reunion, never a lively affair, is interrupted.”

— Agatha Christie

460. “One place is very like another.”

— Agatha Christie

461. “I successfully chloroformed a hedgehog that was entangled in the tennis net and so managed to release it.”

— Agatha Christie

462. “What an awful place to live in England is,... If it isn’t snowing or raining or blowing it’s misty. And if the sun does shine it’s so cold that you can’t feel your fingers or toes.”

— Agatha Christie

463. “He would like, really, to take a long holiday. But he couldn’t afford to do that. He could afford it financially, of course, but he couldn’t afford to drop out. You were soon forgotten nowadays.”

— Agatha Christie

464. “She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read. Wonderful luck that was, Mrs. Oliver thought to herself.”

— Agatha Christie

465. “A secret de Polichinelle is a secret that everyone can know. For this reason the people who do not know it never hear about it – for if everyone thinks you know a thing, nobody tells you.”

— Agatha Christie

466. “A ridiculous-looking little man. The sort of little man one could never take seriously.”

— Agatha Christie

467. “In every family there is usually one member who is a source of trouble and worry.”

— Agatha Christie

468. “It is completely unimportant,” said Poirot. “That is why it is so interesting,” he added softly.”

— Agatha Christie

469. “To win a war is as disasterous as to lose one.”

— Agatha Christie

470. “The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been. And though using slightly different phraseology, the subjects of conversation were the same.”

— Agatha Christie

471. “They’re like children, really. Only children are far more logical which makes it difficult sometimes with them. But these people are illogical, they want to be reassured by your telling them what they want to believe. Then they’re quite happy again for a bit.”

— Agatha Christie

472. “You shouldn’t shoot people,” said Lord Caterham in a tone of mild remonstrance. “You shouldn’t really. I daresay some of them richly deserve it – but all the same it will lead to trouble.”

— Agatha Christie

473. “Murder, you see, is an amateur crime. I’m speaking of course of the kind of murder you have in mind – not gangster stuff. One feels, very often, as though these nice ordinary chaps had been overtaken, as it were, by murder, almost accidentally. They’ve been in a tight place, or they’ve wanted something very badly, money or a woman – and they’ve killed to get it. The brake that operates with most of us doesn’t operate with them.”

— Agatha Christie

474. “I’ve often noticed that once coincidences start happening they go on happening in the most extraordinary way.”

— Agatha Christie

475. “A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves.”

— Agatha Christie

476. “It’s very dangerous to believe people, I haven’t for years.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

478. “People are so proud of their wickedness. Odd, isn’t it, that people who are good are never proud of it?”

— Agatha Christie

479. “The mirror crack’d from side to side: ‘The doom has come upon me,’ cried the Lady of Shalott.”

— Agatha Christie

480. “Murder – the wish to do murder – is something quite different. It – how shall I say? – it defies God.”

— Agatha Christie

481. “There is something about the defencelessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless – so sure. So generous and so demanding.”

— Agatha Christie

482. “A woman should have a certain respect for herself and not submit to humiliation.”

— Agatha Christie

483. “All this red tape and form-filling. That’s what comes of a bureaucratic state. Can’t go where you like and do as you please anymore! Somebody’s always asking questions.”

— Agatha Christie

484. “Thought is yours only. Nobody can alter or influence the use you mean to make of it.”

— Agatha Christie

485. “I felt a distinct pleasure in passing on my own discomfiture.”

— Agatha Christie

486. “The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.”

— Agatha Christie

487. “She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.”

— Agatha Christie

488. “With a shock Iris realized suddenly that it was the first time in her life she had ever thought about Rosemary. Thought about her, that is, objectively, as a person. She had always accepted Rosemary without thinking about her. You didn’t think about your mother or your father or your sister or your aunt. They just existed, unquestioned, in those relationships. You didn’t think about them as people. You didn’t ask yourself, even, what they were like.”

— Agatha Christie

489. “All three wore the air of superiority assumed by people who are already in a place when studying new arrivals.”

— Agatha Christie

490. “What alchemy there was in human beings.”

— Agatha Christie

491. “The two words expressed volumes.”

— Agatha Christie

492. “Writers are diffident creatures – they need encouragement.”

— Agatha Christie

493. “He had a book in his hand which I had lent him. ‘Thank you for lending me this,’ he said. ‘I enjoyed it.’ He put it down beside me. Then he sat down on the end of my bed, looked at me thoughtfully, and said that he wanted to marry me. No Victorian Miss exclaiming, ‘Oh, Mr Simpkins, this is so sudden!’ could have looked more completely taken aback than I did.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

495. “Wonderful things, horses. Never know what they will do, or won’t do.”

— Agatha Christie

496. “But it is one of the great consolations in nature that a man, however unattractive, will find that he is attractive – to some woman.”

— Agatha Christie

497. “Mary seemed to have taken a perverse pleasure in seeing how best she could alternate undercooking and overcooking.”

— Agatha Christie

498. “Many children, most children, I should say, suffer from over-attention on the part of their parents. There is too much love, too much watching over the child.”

— Agatha Christie

499. “The human and personal element can never be ignored.”

— Agatha Christie

500. “What are murderers like? Some of them, have been thoroughly nice chaps.”

— Agatha Christie