Murder – the wish to do murder – is something quite different. It – how shall I say? – it defies God.
Natural affection is one thing,” said Miss Ramsbottom, “and I hope I’ve got as much of it as anyone. But I won’t stand for wickedness. Wickedness has to be destroyed.
I’ve been in love once and if I felt it coming on again I tell you I’d emigrate.
In fact the marriage has been arranged by heaven and Hercule Poirot. All I have to do is to compound a felony.
Yes, I like that – loyalty, I mean. It’s out of fashion nowadays. She’s an odd character, that girl – proud, reserved, stubborn, and terribly warm-hearted underneath, I fancy.
Where am I myself, the whole man, the true man? Where am I with God’s mark upon my brow?
What I wanted, frankly, was someone who would argue me out of the things that I was thinking.
First, you have to think and think and think and think; then you have to force yourself to write it down.
A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity, it dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path.
An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.
There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.
Books are a habit-forming drug.
There’s nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation.
Very few of us are what we seem.
Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.
I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
Dogs are wise. They crawl away into a quiet corner and lick their wounds and do not rejoin the world until they are whole once more.