Top 500 Agatha Christie Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

404. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

412. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

414. “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

415. “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

416. “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

417. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

420. “Elephants are quite enough.”

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

424. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

431. “One place is very like another.”

— Agatha Christie

432. “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

433. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

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

— Agatha Christie

436. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

441. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

443. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

445. “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

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

— Agatha Christie

447. “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

448. “He would like, really, to take a long holiday. But he couldn’t afford to do that. He could afford it financially, of course, but he couldn’t afford to drop out. You were soon forgotten nowadays.”

— Agatha Christie

449. “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

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

— Agatha Christie