Agatha Christie

The popular view 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.

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.

I like a good detective story,' he said. 'But, you know, they begin in the wrong place! They begin with the murder. But the murder is the end. The  story begins long before that—years before sometimes with all the causes and events that bring certain people to a certain place at a certain time on a certain day.

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.

Mon cher docteur! Do you not think I know the female mentality? The village gossip, it is based always, always on the relations of the sexes. If a man poisons his wife in order to travel to the North Pole or to enjoy the peace of a bachelor existence—it would not interest his fellow-villagers for a minute!

The things she said seemed to have very little relation to the last thing she had said a minute before. She was the sort of person, Tommy thought, who might know a great deal more than she chose to reveal.

Women were very queer. Unexpectedly cruel and unexpectedly kind.

There hung about her the restrained energy of a whiplash.

You are not the happy, unthinking child you have always appeared to be, accepting everything at its face value. You are not just one of the women of the household. You are Renisenb who wants to think for herself, who wonders about other people.

The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another.

The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple.