Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “He went out of the compartment and returned a few moments later with a small spirit stove and a pair of curling tongs. “I use them for the moustaches,” he said, referring to the latter.”

— Agatha Christie

452. “In fact,′ said Poirot, ’she stabbed him in the dark, not realising that he was dead already, but somehow deduced that he had a watch in his pyjama pocket, took it out, put back the hands blindly and gave it the requisite dent.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

454. “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

455. “It’s extraordinary, the amount of misunderstandings there are even between two people who discuss a thing quite often – both of them assuming different things and neither of them discovering the discrepancy.”

— Agatha Christie

456. “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

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

— 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. “So I suggest you cut the cackle and come to the horses.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

462. “People with a grudge against the world are always dangerous. They seem to think life owes them something.”

— Agatha Christie

463. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

466. “The great merit of being a doctor,” said Sir Bartholomew, “is that you are not obliged to follow your own advice.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

470. “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

471. “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

472. “There hung about her the restrained energy of a whiplash.”

— 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. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

478. “For sheer primitive rage, commend me to a thoroughgoing humanitarian when you get him well roused.”

— Agatha Christie

479. “The two words expressed volumes.”

— Agatha Christie

480. “Remember, remember The fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot. We see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot.”

— Agatha Christie

481. “Hasting – There are times when it is one’s duty to assert oneself.”

— Agatha Christie

482. “Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely.”

— Agatha Christie

483. “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

484. “I would like it to be said that I was a good writer of detective and thriller stories.”

— Agatha Christie

485. “Sanity is the one unbelievable bore. One must be mad, slightly twisted – then one sees life from a new and entrancing angle.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

487. “I think you’re both behaving like a pair of idiots.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

489. “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.”

— Agatha Christie

490. “Ideas are like everything else. They’ve got to be marketed.”

— Agatha Christie

491. “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” he observed as he sniffed round our ankles. “Excuse the noise, won’t you, but I have my job to do. Got to be careful who we let in, you know. But it’s a dull life and I’m really quite pleased to see a visitor. Dogs of your own, I fancy?”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

494. “To know when to use the truth is the essence of successful deception.”

— Agatha Christie

495. “Time goes a different pace in different places. Some places you come back to, and you feel that time has been busting along at a terrific rate and that all sorts of things will have happened – and changed.”

— Agatha Christie

496. “The caught murderer is necessarily one of the failures. He is second-rate.”

— Agatha Christie

497. “There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

499. “Mr Ratchett wanted to see the world. He was hampered by knowing no languages. I acted more as a courier than a secretary”.”

— Agatha Christie

500. “It is so unkind – ′ ‘Perhaps. But sometimes a compulsion comes over one to speak the truth!”

— Agatha Christie