“To count - really and truly to count - a woman must have goodness or brains.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“Ah! Madame, I reserve the explanations for the last chapter.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“Nowadays, no one believes in evil. It is considered, at most, a mere negation of good. Evil, people say, is done by those who know no better - who are undeveloped - who are to be pitied rather than blamed. But, M. Poirot, evil is real! It is a fact! I believe in Evil as I believe in Good. It exists! It is powerful! It walks the earth!' He stopped. His breath was coming fast. He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief and looked suddenly apologetic. 'I'm sorry. I got carried away.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“It is deplorable...to remove all the romance - all the mystery!”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“That is what I mean. A bath! The receptacle of porcelain, one turns the taps and fills it, one gets in, one gets out and ghoosh - ghoosh - ghoosh, the water goes down the waste pipe!"
"M. Poirot are you quite mad?"
"No, I am extremely sane.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“I enrage myself with an imbecile. I say, 'I would like to kick him.' Instead I kick the table. I say, 'This table, it is the imbecile, I kick him so.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“There is no such thing as a really calm sea. Always, always, there is motion.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“I was interested, M. Poirot, in something you said just now. You said that there was evil done everywhere under the sun. It was almost a quotation from Ecclesiastes.” He paused and then quoted himself: “Yea, also the heart of the sons of men is full of evil, and madness is in their heart while they live.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“To marry and have children, that is the common lot of women. Only one woman in a hundred--more, in a thousand, can make for herself a name and position as you have done.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“There is no such thing as a plain fact of murder. Murder springs, nine times out of ten, out of the character and circumstances of the murdered person. Because the victim was the kind of person he or she was, therefore was he or she murdered! Until we can understand fully and completely exactly what kind of a person [she] was, we shall not be able to see clearly exactly the kind of person who murdered her. From that spring the necessity of our questions.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“Everything is possible, isn't it? The world soon teaches one that!”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“If you hadn’t anything worth saying why go chattering all the time?”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“É un luogo romantico, sì" convenne Poirot, "e tranquillo. Il sole brilla e il mare è un incanto. Ma dimentica, signorina Brewster, che il male si annida dovunque, sotto il sole.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“Mademoiselle, se non è sposata, vuol dire che nessuno del mio sesso è stato abbastanza eloquente: per scelta e non per necessità, si resta nubili.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from Evil Under the Sun
“Red was smiling back at me. “Ok. I'm not in trouble. But tell me your heart didn't start beating for the first time in a month.”
I couldn't deny it. So I didn't.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from Half-Moon Investigations
“If he had driven to the south coast on a different afternoon, I thought. If he had driven there on one of those afternoons when I was there with Jock during the autumn and winter, instead of one of the days when I wasn’t there. And if we had walked toward each other and caught sight of each other, and I had thought, Oh look, there’s Johannes Alby, and he’d thought, Oh look, there’s Dorrit Weger with her little dog. And if we had stopped and chatted, and if I had invited him back to my house for a cup of coffee or a bowl of soup or some pasta. If it had started like that. If it had started then.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, quote from The Unit
“Words, it seems, are like felt pens. If you don't use them for a while they dry up.”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from A Year in the Merde
“Levi’s motives were never quite as obvious. There was an Old Testament ruthlessness about him, Shambler thought, something inscrutably tribal at the root.”
― Michael Crummey, quote from Galore
“Here is something I have learned the hard way, but which a lot of well-meaning people in the West have a hard time accepting: All human beings are equal, but all cultures and religions are not. A culture that celebrates femininity and considers women to be the masters of their own lives is better than a culture that mutilates girls’ genitals and confines them behind walls and veils or flogs or stones them for falling in love. A culture that protects women’s rights by law is better than a culture in which a man can lawfully have four wives at once and women are denied alimony and half their inheritance. A culture that appoints women to its supreme court is better than a culture that declares that the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man. It is part of Muslim culture to oppress women and part of all tribal cultures to institutionalize patronage, nepotism, and corruption. The culture of the Western Enlightenment is better. In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse. Many people genuinely feel pain at the thought of the death of whole cultures. I see this all the time. They ask, “Is there nothing beautiful in these cultures? Is there nothing beautiful in Islam?” There is beautiful architecture, yes, and encouragement of charity, yes, but Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just ugly; it is monstrous.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, quote from Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
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