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

452. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

454. “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

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

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

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

— Agatha Christie

460. “The two words expressed volumes.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

464. “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

465. “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

466. “Old sins have long shadows.”

— 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. “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

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

— 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’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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

477. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

480. “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

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 “The out-of-date returns in due course as the picturesque.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

486. “The intense interest aroused in the public by what was known at the time as “The Styles Case” has now somewhat subsided.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

489. “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

490. “Of course I despise money when I haven’t got any. It’s the only dignified thing to do.”

— Agatha Christie

491. “Things never come when they are expected.”

— Agatha Christie

492. “One knows so little. When one knows more it is too late.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

494. “The rottenness comes from within.”

— Agatha Christie

495. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

498. “Hence King’s Messengers and all that. In medieval days you gave a fellow a signet ring as a sort of open sesame. ‘The King’s Ring! Pass, my lord!’ And usually it was the other fellow who had stolen it. I always wonder why some bright lad never hit on the expedient of copying the ring – making a dozen or so, and selling them at a hundred ducats apiece. They seem to have had no initiative in the Middle Ages.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie