Business is based on the well-known principle of supply and demand. You want something, the other man has it. The only thing left to settle is the price.
One can’t do anything without a man. Men know so much, and are able to get information in so many ways that are simply impossible to women.
Oh, quite so. Count them both in as possibles. She for jealousy. He for his career. Divorce would have dished that. Not that divorce means as much as it used to, but in his case it would have meant the antagonism of the Kidderminster clan.
Everybody knows everybody else’s secrets and that they enter into a kind of conspiracy to pretend that they don’t.
It is so unkind – ′ ‘Perhaps. But sometimes a compulsion comes over one to speak the truth!
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.
Flog this man to death and throw him out in the rubbish heap!
It is a theory of mine,” I said, warming to my theme, “that we owe most of our great inventions and most of the achievements of genius to idleness – either enforced or voluntary. The human mind prefers to be spoon-fed with the thoughts of others, but deprived of such nourishment it will, reluctantly, begin to think for itself – and such thinking, remember, is original thinking and may have valuable results.
Poor Joanna’s handwriting is rather noticeable – sprawls about all over the envelope like an inebriated spider.
One must have the courage to face reality. Without that courage, life is meaningless. The people who do us most harm are the people who shield us from reality.
I know, Hastings – I know. The spoken word and the written – there is an astonishing gulf between them. There is a way of turning sentences that completely reverses the original meaning.
The very simple-minded have often the genius to commit an uncomplicated crime and then leave it alone.
But what is often called an intuition is really an impression based on logical deduction or experience.
He had had a lonely life and a lonely death. But it had been the kind of loneliness that spends itself in living amongst people, and in passing the time that way not unpleasantly.
Snapshots were handed round. The menace of coloured transparencies was in the offing. All the enthusiasts wanted to show their own pictures, but to get out of being forced to see other people’s.
It has always seemed to me so extraordinary that a woman should go so far in the scientific world. I should have thought a purely masculine brain was needed for such work.
I regard St. Mary Mead,” he said authoritatively, “as a stagnant pool.” He looked at us, prepared for resentment at his statement, but somewhat, I think, to his chagrin, no one displayed annoyance. “That is really not a very good simile, dear Raymond,” said Miss Marple briskly. “Nothing, I believe, is so full of life under the microscope as a drop of water from a stagnant pool.
Some of the greatest criminals I have known had the faces of angels.
She took disaster as it should be taken, dealing with it competently and thereby reducing it almost to insignificance.
I attribute my success entirely to my habits of early rising, frugal living, and methodical habits.