“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
“Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from At the Mountains of Madness
“He created his own Kool-Aid reality and was able to illuminate himself by it.”
― Richard Brautigan, quote from Trout Fishing in America
“Like Leontius, the young Athenian in Plato, I presume that you are reading this because you desire a closer look, and that you, too, are properly disturbed by your curiosity. Perhaps, in examining this extremity with me, you hope for some understanding, some insight, some flicker of self-knowledge – a moral, or a lesson, or a clue about how to behave in this world: some such information. I don’t discount the possibility, but when it comes to genocide, you already know right from wrong. The best reason I have come up with for looking closely into Rwanda’s stories is that ignoring them makes me even more uncomfortable about existence and my place in it. The horror, the horror, interests me only insofar as a precise memory of the offense is necessary to understand its legacy.”
― Philip Gourevitch, quote from We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
“In the spring or warmer weather when the snow thaws in the woods the tracks of winter reappear on slender pedestals and the snow reveals in palimpsest old buried wanderings, struggles, scenes of death. Tales of winter brought to light again like time turned back upon itself.”
― Cormac McCarthy, quote from Child of God
“When people are angry, any insult will do; and prejudice is magnified into a cause.”
― Edward Rutherfurd, quote from New York
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