Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes – they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.”

— Agatha Christie

352. “Not instinct, Hastings. Instinct is a bad word. It is my knowledge – my experience – that tells me that something about that letter is wrong –.”

— Agatha Christie

353. “That’s different. She’s a woman, and women act in that silly way. I’m not saying she did it for a moment. She heard he was accused and she trumped up a story. I’m used to that sort of game. You wouldn’t believe the fool things I’ve known women do.”

— Agatha Christie

354. “They tried to be too clever – and that was their undoing.”

— Agatha Christie

355. “For, as Mr. Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.”

— Agatha Christie

356. “I’ve always noticed that if you speak the truth in a rather silly way nobody believes you.”

— Agatha Christie

357. “How often is tittle tattle, as you call it, true! And I think if, as I say, they really examined the facts they would find that it was true nine times out of ten! That’s really just what makes people so annoyed about it.”

— Agatha Christie

358. “I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry,” answered Father Brown. “The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person.”

— Agatha Christie

359. “It is a theory of mine that one always gets what one wants. My.”

— Agatha Christie

360. “I objected vigorously to this unsporting proposal. I recognized in it the disastrous effects of matrimony. How often have I not heard a perfectly intelligent female say, in the tone of one clinching an argument, “Edgar says – ” And all the time you are perfectly aware that Edgar is a perfect fool. Suzanne, by reason of her married state, was yearning to lean upon some man or other.”

— Agatha Christie

361. “It was on the fourth day that the stewardess finally urged me up on deck. Under the impression that I should die quicker below, I had steadfastly refused to leave my bunk. She now tempted me with the advent of Madeira. Hope rose in my breast. I could leave the boat and go ashore and be a parlourmaid there. Anything for dry land.”

— Agatha Christie

362. “Such a landscape was best enjoyed from a car on a fine afternoon. You exclaimed, “Quel beau paysage!” and drove back to a good hotel.”

— Agatha Christie

363. “In the words of a best seller, ‘You’ve nothing on me.”

— Agatha Christie

364. “I’ve a theory that one can always get anything one wants if one will pay the price. And do you know what the price is, nine times out of ten? Compromise.”

— Agatha Christie

365. “If we seek to keep the past alive, we end, I think, by distorting it.”

— Agatha Christie

366. “What good is money if it can’t buy happiness?”

— Agatha Christie

367. “It was very like a dream. Like all dreamers, however, I could not let my dream alone. We poor humans are so anxious not to miss anything.”

— Agatha Christie

368. “Juliet singles out Romeo. Desdemona claims Othello. They have no doubts, the young, no fear, no pride.”

— Agatha Christie

369. “Me and Moosier here have met before – and there’s no man’s judgment I’d sooner take than his. If I’m not greatly mistaken, he’s got something up his sleeve. Isn’t that so, moosier?” Poirot smiled. “I have drawn certain conclusions – yes.”

— Agatha Christie

370. “You’re apt to be done down if you speak nothing but good American.”

— Agatha Christie

371. “No, doctor, I’m going to London. If things happen anywhere, they happen in London.”

— Agatha Christie

372. “It’s just that I am not really a safe person to be with. The life I’d lead wouldn’t be a safe life.”

— Agatha Christie

373. “But afterwards you went on remembering.”

— Agatha Christie

374. “A murderer is always a gambler. And, like many gamblers, a murderer often does not know when to stop. With each crime his opinion of his own abilities is strengthened. His sense of proportion is warped. He does not say, ‘I have been clever and lucky!’ No, he says only, ‘l have been clever!’ And his opinion of his cleverness grows... and then, roes amis, the ball spins.”

— Agatha Christie

375. “There are doubtless certain unworldly people who are indifferent to money. I myself have never met one.”

— Agatha Christie

376. “Her real passion in life was the perfection of a filing system beside which all other filing systems should sink into oblivion. She dreamed of such a system at night.”

— Agatha Christie

377. “With women, love always comes first.”

— Agatha Christie

378. “Where do one’s fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?”

— Agatha Christie

379. “Hercule Poirot stared hard at Superintendent Sugden’s moustache. Its luxuriance seemed to fascinate him.”

— Agatha Christie

380. “Because, you see, if the man were an invention – a fabrication – how much easier to make him disappear!”

— Agatha Christie

381. “The other two waited respectfully while M. Bouc struggled in mental agony.”

— Agatha Christie

382. “They wish not to become adult – not to have to accept our kind of responsibility. And yet like all children, they want to be thought grown up, and free to do what they think are grown up things. And that leads sometimes to tragedy and sometimes to the aftermath of tragedy.”

— Agatha Christie

383. “Ah, but you must have a Christmas uncomplicated by murder.”

— Agatha Christie

384. “Servants must be treated with the utmost courtesy. They are doing skilled work which you could not possibly do yourself without long training. And remember they cannot answer back. You must always be polite to people whose position forbids them to be rude to you. If you are impolite, they will despise you, and rightly, because you have not acted like a lady.”

— Agatha Christie

385. “She’s had a long life of experience in noticing evil, fancying evil, suspecting evil and going forth to do battle with evil.”

— Agatha Christie

386. “The truth is people are an extraordinary mixture of heroism and cowardice.”

— Agatha Christie

387. “Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle appealing manner- Miss Wetherby is a mixture of vinegar and gush. Of the two Miss Marple is the more dangerous.”

— Agatha Christie

388. “When will a woman lie? Sometimes for herself. Usually for the man she loves. Always for her children.”

— Agatha Christie

389. “Having adventures,” I replied. “Episode III of ‘The Perils of Pamela.’ ” I told her the whole story. She gave vent to a deep sigh when I finished. “Why do these things always happen to you?” she demanded plaintively. “Why does no one gag me and bind me hand and foot?” “You wouldn’t like it if they did,” I assured her. “To tell you the truth, I’m not nearly so keen on having adventures myself as I was. A little of that sort of thing goes a long way.”

— Agatha Christie

390. “A murderer is seldom content with one crime. Give him time, and a lack of suspicion, and he’ll commit another.”

— Agatha Christie

391. “Mrs. Cavendish: I am charming to my friends one day, and forget all about them the next.”

— Agatha Christie

392. “A lot of additional pain and grief is caused by honesty,” remarked Hercule Poirot.”

— Agatha Christie

393. “If you people only knew how fatally easy it is to poison someone by mistake, you wouldn’t joke about it.”

— Agatha Christie

394. “Where am I myself, the whole man, the true man? Where am I with God’s mark upon my brow?”

— Agatha Christie

395. “Rest assured,” said Hercule Poirot. “I am the best!”

— Agatha Christie

396. “Women are fiends-absolute fiends.”

— Agatha Christie

397. “Elephants are quite enough.”

— Agatha Christie

398. “England was in a funny state, a different state from what it had been. Or was it really always in the same state? Always underneath the smooth surface there was some black mud. There wasn’t clear water down to the pebbles, down to the shells, lying on the bottom of the sea. There was something moving, something sluggish somewhere, something that had to be found, suppressed.”

— Agatha Christie

399. “Until one looks back on one’s own past one fails to realise what an extraordinary view of the world a child has.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie