But I,” she thought, “am not a whole person. I belong not to myself, but to something outside of me.
It‘s true, isn‘t it? We‘re all waiting for the end.
Such people forget that life and death are the affair of the good God.
I’m not very good at telling things. I mean if I write things, I get them perfectly clear, but if I talk, it always sounds the most frightful muddle.
You and I have a principle in common. We do not approve of murder.
Remember, remember The fifth of November Gunpowder treason and plot. We see no reason Why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot.
But there are three people, madame, to whom a woman should speak the truth. To her Father Confessor, to her hairdresser and to her private detective – if she trusts him.
One does not blow one’s brains out because one has a headstrong daughter!
If you people only knew how fatally easy it is to poison someone by mistake, you wouldn’t joke about it.
But if I am right,” thought Poirot, “and after all, it is natural to me to be right.
She might have trusted you. But She has spent a great deal of her life listening, and those who have listened do not find it easy to talk; they keep their sorrows and joys to themselves and tell no one.
Yes, she thought, that was what despair was. A cold thing – a thing of infinite coldness and loneliness. She’d never understood until now that despair was a cold thing. She had thought of it as something hot and passionate, something violent, a hot-blooded desperation. But that was not so. This was despair – this utter outer darkness of coldness and loneliness. And the sin of despair, that priests talked of, was a cold sin, the sin of cutting oneself off from all warm and living human contacts.
Because, my friend, the more prosaic explanation is nearly always more probable.
I wouldn’t like to deprive you of the pleasure of being clever at my expense!
Do people interest you too, Monsieur Poirot? Or do you reserve your interest for potential criminals?” “Madame – that category would not leave many people outside it.
Now you must realize this, Hastings. Everyone is a potential murderer. In everyone there arises from time to time the wish to kill – though not the will to kill. How often have you not felt or heard others say: ‘She made me so furious.
I was glad I had been brilliant, but I did not want to think of anything complex. I wanted to go to sleep.
It is looking for the needle in the haystack, I grant – but in the haystack there is a needle – of that I am convinced!
We’re both very crime-minded. Read a lot about it.
And, frankly, I don’t like murder. It’s the sort of thing that’s fun to read about in the paper or to read yourself to sleep with in the way of a nice book. But the real thing isn’t so good.