It is the courage, the insistence, the ruthless force of youth.
Human nature is always interesting, Sir Henry. And it’s curious to see how certain types always tend to act in exactly the same way.
The two words expressed volumes.
Edward turned to Miss Marple. “It’s like this, you see. As Uncle Mathew grew older, he got more and more suspicious. He didn’t trust anybody.” “Very wise of him,” said Miss Marple. “The depravity of human nature is unbelievable.
I suppose I saw photos of him in the papers, but I wouldn’t recognize my own mother when a press photographer had done with her.
Well, people are like that too. THey create a false door – to deceive. If they are conscious of weakness, of inefficiency, they make an imposing door of self-assertion, of bluster, of overwhelming authority – and, after a time, they get to believe in it themselves. They think, and everybody thinks, that they are like that. But behind that door, Renisenb, is bare rock... And so when reality comes and touches them with the feather of truth – their true self reasserts itself.
Everything costs so much – clothes and one’s face – and just silly things like cinemas and cocktails – and even gramophone records!’ Roddy.
There was something magical about an island – the mere word suggested fantasy. You lost touch with the world – an island was a world of its own. A world, perhaps, from which you might never return. He thought: “I’m leaving my ordinary life behind me.” And, smiling to himself, he began to make plans, fantastic plans for the future. He was still smiling when he walked up the rock-cut steps. In.
I should hope, Mr. Poirot, that whatever our feelings, we can keep them in decent control. And we can certainly control our actions.
Sitting here, literally amongst the dead, reckoning up gains and losses, casting accounts, I have come to see gains that cannot be reckoned in terms of wealth, and losses that are more damaging than loss of a crop... I look at the River and I see the lifeblood of Egypt that has existed before we lived and that will exist after we die... Life and death, Renisenb, are not of such great account.
You can always depend on an Englishman to play the game.
I always feel that young doctors are only too anxious to experiment. After they’ve whipped out all our teeth, and administered quantities of very peculiar glands, and removed bits of our insides, they then confess that nothing can be done for us. I really prefer the old-fashioned remedy of big black bottles of medicine. After all, one can always pour those down the sink.
No human being should learn from another. Each individual should develop his own powers to the uttermost, not try to imitate those of someone else. I do not wish you to be a second and inferior Poirot. I wish you to be the supreme Hastings. And you are the supreme Hastings. In you, Hastings, I find the normal mind almost perfectly illustrated.
She could not fail to observe that a life of academic distinction was singularly ill rewarded. She had no desire whatever to teach and she took pleasure in contacts with minds much less brilliant than her own. In short, she had a taste for people, all sorts of people – and not the same people the whole time.
It can happen that if anyone is talking to a person they know cannot see well, they are careless. They permit themselves an expression of face that on other occasions they would not allow.
May your moustaches never grow less.
I think Mrs. Leidner seems happier already from just talking about it. That’s always a help, you know. It’s bottling things up that makes them get on your nerves.
I mean that if you are not absolutely sure of a thing, it is so difficult to commit yourself to a definite course of action.
Who can tell? It may be that there must always be growth – and that if one does not grow kinder and wiser and greater, then the growth must be the other way, fostering the evil things. Or it may be that the life they all led was too shut in, too folded back upon itself – without breadth or vision. Or it may be that, like a disease of crops, it is contagious, that first one and then another is sickened.
I pass over the spectacle of Poirot on a camel. He started by groans and lamentations and ended by shrieks, gesticulations and invocations to the Virgin Mary and every Saint in the calendar. In the end, he descended ignominiously and finished the journey on a diminutive donkey.