Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time. Shakespeare is ruined for most people by having been made to learn it at school; you should see Shakespeare as it was written to be seen, played on the stage. There you can appreciate it quite young, long before you take in the beauty of the words and of the poetry.”

— Agatha Christie

402. “He’s very nice,” said Mrs. Clayton, “but not quite quite, you know. Hasn’t got any idea of culture.” Richard found his room exceedingly comfortable, and his appreciation of Mrs. Clayton as a hostess rose still higher.”

— Agatha Christie

403. “It’s very inconvenient to be loved. Nearly everyone has found that out, sooner or later. The fewer people who love you the less you will have to suffer.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

405. “It is my experience that no one, in the course of conversation, can fail to give themselves away sooner or later. Everyone has an irresistible urge to talk about themselves.”

— Agatha Christie

406. “Old sins have long shadows.”

— Agatha Christie

407. “Exactly! It is absurd – improbable – it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! One cannot escape from the facts.”

— Agatha Christie

408. “Evil is not any superhuman, but it is HUMAN.”

— Agatha Christie

409. “The chains of habit. We work to attain an object, and the object gained, we find that what we miss is the daily toil.”

— Agatha Christie

410. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’ve got a plan. But I’ve got an idea. It’s a very useful thing sometimes, an idea. – Superintendent Battle.”

— Agatha Christie

411. “I’ll break every bone in your damned body, you dirty little whippersnapper,” he said.”

— Agatha Christie

412. “I had the firm conviction that, if I went about looking for adventure, adventure would meet me halfway. It is a theory of mine that one always gets what one wants.”

— Agatha Christie

413. “You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.”

— Agatha Christie

414. “Don’t think. That is the wrong way to bring anything back. Let it go. Sooner or later it will flash into your mind.”

— Agatha Christie

415. “I always take abroad with me one really good soft pillow – to me it makes all the difference between comfort and misery.”

— Agatha Christie

416. “Why do you decry the world we live in? There are good people in it. Isn’t muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that’s imposed, a world order that may be right today and wrong tomorrow? I would rather have a world of kindly, faulty, human beings, than a world of superior robots who’ve said goodbye to pity and understanding and sympathy.”

— Agatha Christie

417. “All the same, lots of women buy their clothes in Paris, and have not, on that account, necessarily poisoned their husbands.”

— Agatha Christie

418. “One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.”

— Agatha Christie

419. “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

420. “It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”

— Agatha Christie

421. “And most conveniently she leaves her handkerchief behind!” said Poirot. “Exactly as it happens in the books and on the films – and to make things even easier for us it is marked with an initial.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

423. “Women, however charming, have this disadvantage: they distract the mind from food!”

— Agatha Christie

424. “It is the brain, the little grey cells” – he topped his forehead – “on which one must rely. The senses mislead.”

— Agatha Christie

425. “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

426. “Sometimes one sees things clearly years afterwards than one could possibly at the time.”

— Agatha Christie

427. “Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them.”

— Agatha Christie

428. “Madame, the most kind, the most amiable are not always the cleverest.”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

430. “One place is very like another.”

— Agatha Christie

431. “There’s no doubt about what the man’s profession has been. He’s a retired hairdresser. Look at that moustache of his.”

— Agatha Christie

432. “Arrange your ideas. Be methodical. Be orderly. There is the secret of success.”

— Agatha Christie

433. “We think with horror now of the days when we burnt witches. I believe the day will come when we will shudder to think that we ever hanged criminals.”

— Agatha Christie

434. “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

435. “Men are like that... They remain boys...”

— Agatha Christie

436. “Only cats and witches walk in the dark.”

— Agatha Christie

437. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

439. “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

440. “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

441. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

443. “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

444. “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

445. “When you find that people are not telling you the truth – look out!”

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

447. “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

448. “Really, I have no gifts – no gifts at all – except perhaps a certain knowledge of human nature. People, I find, are apt to be far too trustful. I’m afraid that I have a tendency always to believe the worst. Not a nice trait. But so often justified by subsequent events.”

— Agatha Christie

449. “When the fact doesn’t meet the theory then let go the theory.”

— Agatha Christie

450. “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