A child says ‘Thank God for my good dinner.’ What can I say at seventy-five? ‘Thank God for my good life, and for all the love that has been given to me.
A man when he is making up to anybody can be cordial and gallant and full of little attentions and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love he can’t help looking like a sheep.
A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world
An appreciative listener is always stimulating.
An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets the more interested he is in her.
Any woman can fool a man if she wants to and if he’s in love with her.
At my time of life, one knows that the worst is usually true.
At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction, it fascinated rather than repelled.
But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.
Coffee in England always tastes like a chemistry experiment.
Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions.
Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.
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.
Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.
Every woman should marry an archaeologist because she grows increasingly attractive to him as she grows increasingly to resemble a ruin.
Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory, let the theory go.
Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity.
Evil is not something superhuman, it’s something less than human.
Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it.
He was very much a man of moods, possibly owing to what is styled the artistic temperment. I have never seen, myself, why the possession of artistic ability should be supposed to excuse a man from a decent exercise of self-control.
I always think loyalty’s such a tiresome virtue.
I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.
I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention. Invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness, to save oneself trouble.
I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming, suddenly you find, at the age of 50, say, that a whole new life has opened before you.
I have no pity for myself either. So let it be Veronal. But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows.
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.
I know there’s a proverb which that says ‘To err is human’, but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.
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.
I live now on borrowed time, waiting in the anteroom for the summons that will inevitably come. And then I go on to the next thing, whatever it is. One doesn’t luckily have to bother about that.
I married an archaeologist because the older I grow, the more he appreciates me.
I specialize in murders of quiet, domestic interest.
If I was born once again, I would like to be a woman – always!
If I were at any time to set out on a career of deceit, it would be of Miss Marple that I should be afraid.
If one chooses to look back over the yourney that has been one’s life, is one entitled to ignore those memories that one dislikes? Or is that cowardice? I think, perhaps, one should take one brief look, and say: “Yes, this is a part of my life, but it’s done with. It is a strand in the tapesary of my existence. I must recognise it because it is part of me. But there is no need to dwell upon it.
If one sticks too rigidly to one’s principles, one would hardly see anybody.
If you are to be Hercule Poirot, you must think of everything.
If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it, often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect
If you place your head in a lion’s mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.
Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.
Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.
It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
It is never good to entirely quit with work.
It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.
It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story.
It’s astonishing in this world how things don’t turn out at all the way you expect them to.
It’s so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in his cap.
I’ve always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.
Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes – they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice.
Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.
Never go back to a place where you have been happy. Until you do it remains alive for you. If you go back it will be destroyed.
One doesn’t recognize the really important moments in one’s life until it’s too late.
One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing; that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.
One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy chilhood. I had a very happy childhood.
One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers.
She was a lucky woman who had established a happy knack of writing what quite a lot of people wanted to read.
The amount of missing girls I’ve had to trace and their family and their friends always say the same thing. “She was a bright and affectionate disposition and had no men friends”. That’s never true. It’s unnatural. Girls ought to have men friends. If not, then there’s something wrong about them.
The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves they don’t give a damn.
The human mind prefers to be spoonfed 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.
The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.
The popular idea that a child forgets easily is not an accurate one. Many people go right through life in the grip of an idea which has been impressed on them in very tender years.
The saddest thing in life and the hardest to live through, is the knowledge that there is someone you love very much whom you cannot save from suffering.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
The simplest explanation is always the most likely.
The young people think the old people are fools, but the old people know the young people are fools.
There is no greater mistake in life than seeing things or hearing them at the wrong time.
There is nothing more thrilling in this world, I think, than having a child that is yours, and yet is mysteriously a stranger.
There was a moment when I changed from an amateur to a professional. I assumed the burden of a profession, which is to write even when you don’t want to, don’t much like what you’re writing, and aren’t writing particularly well.
There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.
These little grey cells. It is up to them.
To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.
To every problem, there is a most simple solution.
Too much mercy, often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second.
Truth, however bitter, can be accepted, and woven into a design for living.
Very few of us are what we seem.
We are the same people as we were at three, six, ten or twenty years old. More noticeably so, perhaps, at six or seven, because we were not pretending so much then.
When engaged in eating, the brain should be the servant of the stomach.
When you find that people are not telling you the truth, look out!
Where large sums of money are concerned, it is advisable to trust nobody.
Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a confirmed liar, and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without its impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.
Words, madmoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.
