“Never do anything yourself that others can do for you.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“My remarks are, as always, apt, sound, and to the point. (Hercule Poirot)”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“These blondes, sir, they're responsible for a lot of trouble.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“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!”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“It is fundamentals that matter --- not the trappings. (Alice Cunningham)”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“Got on! Got on! It's not a question of getting on. That's the wrong view altogether. The Classics aren't a ladder leading to quick success.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“Take this Hercules -this hero! Hero, indeed! What was he but a large muscular creature of low intelligence and criminal tendencies!”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“I gather," he added, "that you've never had much time to study the classics?"
"That is so."
"Pity. Pity. You've missed a lot. Everyone should be made to study the classics, if I had my way."
Poirot shrugged his shoulders.
"Eh bien, I have got on very well without them."
"Got on! Got on? It's not a question of getting on. That's the wrong view all together. The classics aren't a ladder leading to quick success, like a modern correspondence course! It's not a man's working hours that are important--it's his leisure hours. That's the mistake we all make. Take yourself now, you're getting on, you'll be wanting to get out of things, to take things easy--what are you going to do then with your leisure hours?”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“It will prove, I fear, too Herculean a task for us.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“Poirot, watching him, felt suddenly a doubt--an uncomfortable twinge. Was there, here, something that he had missed? Some richness of the spirit? Sadness crept over him. Yes, he should have become acquainted with the classics. Long ago. Now, alas, it was too late....”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“It's really very unpleasant. And not being able to say anything to answer back makes it rankle more, if you know what I mean.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“My dear Mr. Schwartz, you appeared in the nick of time. It might have been a drama on the stage! I am very much in your debt.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“It is the sex angle that sells stories, that makes news. give people scandal allied to sex and it appeals far more than any mere political chicanery or fraud. (Hercule Poirot)”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“But seriously Poirot, what a hobby! Compare that to--" his voice sank to an appreciative purr--"an easy chair in front of a wood fire in a long low room lined with books--must be a long room--not a square one. Books all round one. A glass of port--and a book open in your hand. Time rolls back as you read.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“Can one build an honest house on dishonest foundation? I do not know. But I do know that I want to try. (Edward Ferrier)”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“Take this Hercules - this hero! hero, indeed! What was he but a large muscular creature of low intelligence and criminal tendencies! Poirot was reminded of one Adolfe Durand, a butcher who had been tried at Lyon in 1895 - a creature of oxlike strength who had killed several children. The defence had been epilepsy - from which he undoubtedly suffered - though whether grand mal or petit mal had been an argument of several days' discussion. This ancient Hercules probably suffered from grand mal. No, Poirot shook his head, if that was the Greeks' idea of a hero, then meassured by modern standards, it certainly would not do. The whole classical pattern shocked him. These gods and goddesses - they seemed to have as many different aliases as a modern criminal. indeed they seemed to be definitely criminal types, Drink, debauchery, incest, rape, homicide and chicanery - enought to keep a fuge d'Instruction constantly busy. No decent family life, No order, no method. even in their crimes, no order or method!”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“The Agatha Christie Collection Christie Crime Classics The Man in the Brown Suit The Secret of Chimneys The Seven Dials Mystery The Mysterious Mr Quin The Sittaford”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“You might start a new religion yourself, with the creed: 'There is no one so clever as Hercule Poirot, Amen, D. C. Repeat ad lib.'!”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“starting off from Cranchester. All later events seem to have been wiped”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“9. Lord Edgware Dies (1933) Poirot”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Labours of Hercules
“In my experience, boys are predictable. As soon as they think of something, they do it. Girls are smarter—they plan ahead. They think about not getting caught.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from Half-Moon Investigations
“You haven't forgotten what it feels like to lose a friend because of a child, I hope?" If course I hadn't forgotten that feeling of being abruptly pushed out of a close circle to some distant periphery. Coming second, third, fourth, last. Being treated like someone less knowledgeable, someone inferior.”
― Ninni Holmqvist, quote from The Unit
“I was also sick of my neighbors, as most Parisians are. I now knew every second of the morning routine of the family upstairs. At 7:00 am alarm goes off, boom, Madame gets out of bed, puts on her deep-sea divers’ boots, and stomps across my ceiling to megaphone the kids awake. The kids drop bags of cannonballs onto the floor, then, apparently dragging several sledgehammers each, stampede into the kitchen. They grab their chunks of baguette and go and sit in front of the TV, which is always showing a cartoon about people who do nothing but scream at each other and explode. Every minute, one of the kids cartwheels (while bouncing cannonballs) back into the kitchen for seconds, then returns (bringing with it a family of excitable kangaroos) to the TV. Meanwhile the toilet is flushed, on average, fifty times per drop of urine expelled. Finally, there is a ten-minute period of intensive yelling, and at 8:15 on the dot they all howl and crash their way out of the apartment to school.” (p.137)”
― Stephen Clarke, quote from A Year in the Merde
“From what I have seen of the world, Reverend, motherhood is a certainty, but fatherhood is a subject of debate.”
― Michael Crummey, quote from Galore
“this reaction. This was on college campuses, exactly the kind of environment where I had expected curiosity, lively debate, and, yes, the thrill and energy of like-minded activists. Instead almost every campus audience I encountered bristled with anger and protest. I was accustomed to radical Muslim students from my experience as an activist and a politician in Holland. Any time I made a public speech, they would swarm to it in order to shout at me and rant in broken Dutch, in sentences so fractured you wondered how they qualified as students at all. On college campuses in the United States and Canada, by contrast, young and highly articulate people from the Muslim student associations would simply take over the debate. They would send e-mails of protest to the organizers beforehand, such as one (sent by a divinity student at Harvard) that protested that I did not “address anything of substance that actually affects Muslim women’s lives” and that I merely wanted to “trash” Islam. They would stick up posters and hand out pamphlets at the auditorium. Before I’d even stopped speaking they’d be lining up for the microphone, elbowing away all non-Muslims. They spoke in perfect English; they were mostly very well-mannered; and they appeared far better assimilated than their European immigrant counterparts. There were far fewer bearded young men in robes short enough to show their ankles, aping the tradition that says the Prophet’s companions dressed this way out of humility, and fewer girls in hideous black veils. In the United States a radical Muslim student might have a little goatee; a girl may wear a light, attractive headscarf. Their whole demeanor was far less threatening, but they were omnipresent. Some of them would begin by saying how sorry they were for all my terrible suffering, but they would then add that these so-called traumas of mine were aberrant, a “cultural thing,” nothing to do with Islam. In blaming Islam for the oppression of women, they said, I was vilifying them personally, as Muslims. I had failed to understand that Islam is a religion of peace, that the Prophet treated women very well. Several times I was informed that attacking Islam only serves the purpose of something called “colonial feminism,” which in itself was allegedly a pretext for the war on terror and the evil designs of the U.S. government. I was invited to one college to speak as part of a series of”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali, quote from Nomad: From Islam to America: A Personal Journey Through the Clash of Civilizations
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