Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

456. “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

457. “Achievement brings with it its own anticlimax.”

— Agatha Christie

458. “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

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

463. “The two words expressed volumes.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

466. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

469. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

476. “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

477. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

487. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

489. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

496. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

499. “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

500. “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