1. “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.”
2. “The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”
3. “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.”
4. “Everybody said, ‘Follow your heart.’ I did, it got broken.”
5. “An archaeologist is the best husband a woman can have. The older she gets, the more interested he is in her.”
6. “It is a curious thought, but it is only when you see people looking ridiculous that you realize just how much you love them.”
7. “If you place your head in a lion’s mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off.”
8. “Very few of us are what we seem.”
9. “Instinct is a marvelous thing. It can neither be explained nor ignored.”
10. “Life is like a train, Mademoiselle. It goes on. And it is a good thing that that is so.”
11. “One must make one’s own mistakes.”
12. “One may live in a big house and yet have no comfort.”
13. “Death, Mademoiselle, unfortunately creates prejudice—a prejudice in favour of the deceased.”
14. “I think people more often kill those they love, than those they hate. Possibly because only the people you love can really make life unendurable to you.”
15. “Evil is not any superhuman, but it is human.”
16. “In everybody’s life, there are hidden chapters which they hope may never be known.”
17. “The heart of a woman who loves will forgive many blows.”
18. “Use that fluff of yours you call a brain.”
19. “How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think.”
20. “One doesn’t recognize the really important moments in one’s life until it’s too late.”
21. “Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.”
22. “To every problem, there is a most simple solution.”
23. “But no artist, I now realize, can be satisfied with art alone. There is a natural craving for recognition which cannot be gained.”
24. “As life goes on, it becomes tiring to keep up the character you invented for yourself, and so you relapse into individuality and become more like yourself everyday.”
25. “If you are to be Hercule Poirot, you must think of everything.”
26. “I always think such a tiresome virtue.”
27. “It is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.”
28. “Our weapon is our knowledge. But remember, it may be a knowledge we may not know that we possess.”
29. “It’s what’s in yourself that makes you happy or unhappy.”
30. “You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”
31. “Women can accept the fact that a man is a rotter, a swindler, a drug taker, a , and a general swine, without batting an eyelash, and without impairing their affection for the brute in the least. Women are wonderful realists.”
32. “I know there’s a proverb which says, ‘To err is human,’ but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries.”
33. “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.”
34. “An appreciative listener is always stimulating.”
35. “Words are such uncertain things. They so often sound good, but mean the opposite of what one thinks they do.”
36. “They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.”
37. “People should be interested in books, not their authors.”
38. “A woman who doesn’t lie is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.”
39. “Fear is incomplete knowledge.”
40. “It is really . Men will not be nice to you if you are not good looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.”
41. “One of the saddest things in life is the things one remembers.”
42. “In the midst of life, we are in death.”
43. “I don’t think necessity is the of invention.”
44. “It’s like all those quiet people, when they do lose their tempers they lose them with a vengeance.”
45. “I don’t know. I don’t know at all. And that’s what’s frightening the life out of me—to have no idea.”
46. “Sometimes, I feel sure he is as mad as a hatter and then, just as he is at his maddest, I find there is a method in his madness.”
47. “At my time of life, one knows that the worst is usually true.”
48. “Ah, but life is like that! It does not permit you to arrange and order it as you will. It will not permit you to escape emotion, to live by the intellect and by reason!”
49. “Life, Mr. Welman, whatever else it is, is not reasonable.”
50. “Never tell all you know—not even to the person you know best.”
51. “Funnily enough, I’d most women with the truth about their husbands.”
52. “The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.”
53. “Let them believe that they’re loved and wanted, and then show them that it’s all a sham.”
54. “It is completely unimportant. That is why it is so interesting.”
55. “Everyone is a potential murderer. In everyone, there arises from time to time the wish to kill—though not the will to kill.”
56. “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.”
57. “One must seek the truth within—not without.”
58. “When you find that people are not telling you the truth—look out!”
59. “I’m sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes.”
60. “The young people think the old people are fools, but the old people know the young people are fools.”
61. “Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory, let the theory go.”
62. “I do not argue with obstinate men. I act in spite of them.”
63. “Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.”
64. “Tea! Bless ordinary everyday afternoon tea!”
65. “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.”
66. “One of us in this very room is in fact the murderer.”
67. “Elephants can remember, but we are human beings and mercifully human beings can forget.”
68. “When engaged in eating, the brain should be the servant of the stomach.”
69. “They tried to be too clever, and that was their undoing.”
70. “Time is the best killer.”
71. “Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it.”
72. “Every murderer is probably somebody’s old friend.”
73. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
74. “Everybody always knows something, even if it’s something they don’t know they know.”
75. “To rush into explanations is always a sign of weakness.”
76. “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.”
77. “The happy people are failures because they are on such good terms with themselves they don’t give a damn.”
78. “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.”
79. “There is too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will. I must concede you the Devil. God doesn’t really need to punish us, Miss Barton. We’re so busy punishing ourselves.”
80. “But surely for everything you love you have to pay some price.”
81. “A man, when he is making up with anybody, can be cordial and gallant and full of little attention and altogether charming. But when a man is really in love, he can’t help looking like a sheep.”
82. “One is left with the horrible feeling now that war settles nothing—that to win a war is as disastrous as to lose one.”
83. “But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things.”
84. “One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood.”
85. “Liking is more important than loving. It lasts.”
86. “What good is money if it can’t buy happiness?”
87. “How can I go on living here and suspecting everybody?”
88. “Oh! my dear Love, I know. You want reality. So do I. What’s between us will last forever because it’s founded on reality.”
89. “Love can be a very frightening thing. That is why most great love stories are tragedies.”
90. “It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way around. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.”
91. “Invention arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness—to save oneself trouble.”
92. “Words, Mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.”
93. “I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.”
94. “It is the brain—the little gray cells on which one must rely.”
95. “I often wonder why the whole world is so prone to generalize. Generalizations are seldom, if ever true and are usually utterly inaccurate.”
96. “Intuition is like reading a word without having to spell it out. A child can’t do that because it has had so little experience. A grown-up person knows the word because they’ve seen it often before.”
97. “Some girls are businesslike and some aren’t. Some men are sentimental and muddle-headed, others are clear-headed and logical. There are just different types of brains.”
98. “It had come about exactly in the way things happened in books.”
99. “There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.”
100. “A great many men are mad, and no one knows it. They do not know it themselves.”
101. “Be sure, your sin will find you out.”
102. “The body—the cage—is everything of the most respectable, but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.”
103. “Women observe subconsciously a thousand little details, without knowing that they are doing so. Their subconscious mind adds these little things together—and they call the result intuition.”
104. “What I feel is that if one has got to have a murder actually happening in one’s house, one might as well enjoy it, if you know what I mean.”
105. “There was something 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.”
106. “Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective.”
107. “Evil never goes unpunished, Monsieur. But the punishment is sometimes secret.”
108. “No sign, so far, of anything sinister—but I live in hope.”
109. “Curious thing, rooms. Tell you quite a lot about the people who live in them.”
110. “One is alone when the last one who remembers is gone.”
111. “For in the long run, either through a lie or through truth, people were bound to give themselves away.”
112. “People who can be very good can be very bad too.”
113. “Fear—what a strange thing fear was.”
114. “It’s so much nicer to be a secret and delightful sin to anybody than to be a feather in his cap.”
115. “That’s peace—real peace. To come to the end—not to have to go on. Yes, peace.”
116. “The trouble with you and me is that we don’t live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.”
117. “Difficulties are made to be overcome.”
118. “Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.”
119. “Conversations are always dangerous, if you have something to hide.”
120. “Best of an island is once you get there, you can’t go any farther. You’ve come to the end of things.”
121. “The human face is, after all, nothing more nor less than a mask.”
122. “One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.”
123. “He laughs best who laughs at the end.”
124. “To care passionately for another human creature brings always more sorrow than joy; but at the same time, Elinor, one would not be without experience. Anyone who has never really loved has never really lived.”
125. “Two people rarely see the same thing.”
126. “I like to see an angry Englishman. They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.”
127. “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.”
128. “To count—really and truly to count—a woman must have goodness or brains.”
