There is at Christmas time a great deal of hypocrisy, honourable hypocrisy, hypocrisy undertaken pour le bon motif, c’est entendu, but nevertheless hypocrisy!
It is completely unimportant,” said Poirot. “That is why it is so interesting,” he added softly.
Tea’s a thing that need never be finished.
I have learned to save myself useless emotion.
Rest assured,” said Hercule Poirot. “I am the best!
From now on, it is our task to suspect each and everyone amongst us. Forewarned is forearmed. Take no risks and be alert to danger. That is all.
Inestimable harm may be done by foolish wagging of tongues in ill-natured gossip.
It seems dreadful to say so, but there is something attractive to a girl in being told anyone is a bad man. She thinks at once that her love will reform him.
Mary seemed to have taken a perverse pleasure in seeing how best she could alternate undercooking and overcooking.
A statesman in these days has a difficult task. He has to pursue the policy he deems advantageous to his country, but he has at the same time to recognize the force of popular feeling. Popular feeling is very often sentimental, muddleheaded, and eminently unsound, but it cannot be disregarded for all that.
Nobody understands the art of living nowadays,... Catching trains, making appointments, fixing times for everything – all nonsense. Get up with the sun I say, have your meals when you feel like it, and never tie yourself to a time or a date. I could teach people how to live if they would listen to me.
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.
There’s a convention that one doesn’t speak ill of the dead. That’s stupid, I think. The truth’s always the truth. On the whole it’s better to keep your mouth shut about living people. You might conceivably injure them. The dead are past that. But the harm they’ve done lives after them sometimes.
Because, you see, if the man were an invention – a fabrication – how much easier to make him disappear!
I have always disapproved of murder.
And suddenly one of those moments of intense happiness came to her – a sense of the loveliness of the world – of her own intense enjoyment of that world.
The happiness of one man and one woman is the greatest thing in all the world.
Man is an unoriginal animal. Unoriginal within the law in his daily respectable life, equally unoriginal outside the law. If a man commits a crime, any other crime he commits will resemble it closely.
Iris was too languid and too used to Mrs. Drake’s discursive style to inquire why the mention of Dr. Gaskell should have reminded her aunt of the local grocer, though had she done so, she would have received the immediate response: “Because the grocer’s name is Cranford, my dear.” Aunt Lucilla’s reasoning was always crystal clear to herself.
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.