Agatha Christie · 381 pages
Rating: (64.1K votes)
“It is really a hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.”
“What good is money if it can't buy happiness?”
“A diary is useful for recording the idiosyncrasies of other people—but not one’s own.”
“I dare say it is good for one now and again to realize what an idiot one can be! But no one relishes the process.”
“I had the firm conviction that, if I went about looking for adventure, adventure would meet me halfway. It is a theory of mine that one always gets what one wants.”
“But there are many fools in the world. One praises God for their existence and keeps out of their way.”
“It was on the fourth day that the stewardess finally urged me up on deck. Under the impression that I should die quicker below, I had steadfastly refused to leave my bunk. She now tempted me with the advent of Madeira. Hope rose in my breast. I could leave the boat and go ashore and be a parlourmaid there. Anything for dry land.”
“Suzanne likes thrills, but she hates being uncomfortable.”
“You know I want you. You know that I’d give my soul to pick you up in my arms and keep you here, hidden away from the world, forever and ever.”
“Having adventures,” I replied. “Episode III of ‘The Perils of Pamela.’ ” I told her the whole story. She gave vent to a deep sigh when I finished. “Why do these things always happen to you?” she demanded plaintively. “Why does no one gag me and bind me hand and foot?” “You wouldn’t like it if they did,” I assured her. “To tell you the truth, I’m not nearly so keen on having adventures myself as I was. A little of that sort of thing goes a long way.”
“Guy Pagett is my secretary, a zealous, painstaking, hardworking fellow, admirable in every respect. I know no one who annoys me more. For a long time I have been racking my brains as to how to get rid of him. But you cannot very well dismiss a secretary because he prefers work to play, likes getting up early in the morning, and has positively no vices. The only amusing thing about the fellow is his face. He has the face of a fourteenth-century poisoner—the sort of man the Borgias got to do their odd jobs for them.”
“It was very like a dream. Like all dreamers, however, I could not let my dream alone. We poor humans are so anxious not to miss anything.”
“Several very suprising things have occurred. To begin with, I met Augustus Milray, the most perfect example of an old ass the present Government has produced. His manner oozed diplomatic secrecy as he drew me aside in the Club into a quiet corner.”
“I objected vigorously to this unsporting proposal. I recognized in it the disastrous effects of matrimony. How often have I not heard a perfectly intelligent female say, in the tone of one clinching an argument, “Edgar says—” And all the time you are perfectly aware that Edgar is a perfect fool. Suzanne, by reason of her married state, was yearning to lean upon some man or other.”
“A man who has shot lions in large quantities has an unfair advantage over other men.”
“أنت تعتقد أنك تعجب بالميزات الاخلاقية ولكن عندما تقع في الحب فأنت تعود إلى فطرتك البدائية حيث تكون القوة الجسدية هي المفضلة”
“We never seemed to have any money. His celebrity was not of the kind that brought in a cash return. Although he was a fellow of almost every important society and had rows of letters after his name, the general public scarcely knew of his existence, and his long-learned books, though adding signally to the sum total of human knowledge, had no attraction for the masses.”
“إن العشاق يتشاجرون دائماً لأنهم لا يفهمون بعضهم، وعندما يأتي الوقت الذي يفهمون فيه بعضهم فإنهم يفقدون حبهم”
“أتمنى لو كنا نستطيع أن نتأكد من أن الناس الذين يقتلون هم من يستحقون الموت، أقصد هؤلاء الذين يريدون القتال وليس فقط المساكين الذين يعيشون في المناطق التي يدور فيها القتال”
“She was a very good, kind woman. I could not have continued to live in the same house with her, but I did recognize her intrinsic worth.”
“The Beddingfeld girl was deep in conversation with the missionary parson, Chichester. Women always flutter round parsons.”
“I reflected a minute and then asked why he wanted to marry me. That seemed to fluster him a good deal, and he murmured that a wife was a great help to a general practitioner. The position seemed even more unromantic than before, and yet something in me urged towards its acceptance. Safety, that was what I was being offered. Safety—and a Comfortable Home. Thinking it over now, I believe I did the little man an injustice. He was honestly in love with me, but a mistaken delicacy prevented him from pressing his suit on those lines. Anyway, my love of romance rebelled.”
“He was tall and broad-shouldered, wore a dark overcoat and black boots, a bowler hat. He had a dark-pointed beard and gold-rimmed eyeglasses.” “Take away the overcoat, the beard and the eyeglasses, and there wouldn’t be much to know him by,” grumbled the inspector. “He could alter his appearance easily enough in five minutes if he wanted to—which he would do if he’s the swell pickpocket you suggest.” I had not intended to suggest anything of the kind. But from this moment I gave the inspector up as hopeless. “Nothing more you can tell us about him?” he demanded, as I rose to depart. “Yes,” I said. I seized my opportunity to fire a parting shot. “His head was markedly brachycephalic. He will not find it so easy to alter that.” I observed with pleasure that Inspector Meadows’s pen wavered. It was clear that he did not know how to spell brachycephalic.”
“He’s like all the rest of these people; they make inflammatory speeches of enormous length, solely for political purposes, and then wish they hadn’t.”
“It is really a very hard life. Men will not be nice to you if you are not good-looking, and women will not be nice to you if you are.”
“No, doctor, I'm going to London. If things happen anywhere, they happen in London.”
“Caroline is the lady who cooks for me. Incidentally she is the wife of my gardener. What kind of a wife she makes I do not know, but she is an excellent cook. James, on the other hand, is not a good gardener—but I support him in idleness and give him the lodge to live in solely on account of Caroline’s cooking.”
“Does nothing frighten you, Anne Beddingfeld?” “Oh, yes,” I said, with an assumption of coolness I was far from feeling. “Wasps, sarcastic women, very young men, cockroaches, and superior shop assistants.”
“dare say it is good for one now and again to realize what an idiot one can be! But nobody relishes the process.”
“My father, Professor Beddingfeld, was one of England’s greatest living authorities on Primitive Man. He really was a genius—everyone admits that. His mind dwelt in Palaeolithic times, and the inconvenience of life for him was that his body inhabited the modern world. Papa did not care for modern man—even Neolithic Man he despised as a mere herder of cattle, and he did not rise to enthusiasm until he reached the Mousterian period.”
“Only a woman could make so much out of so little. Give them a single fact and they'd fashion it into a story before taking a single breath.”
“HECUBA: I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he's some mother's son just as Hector was, and aren't we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn't It be like killing family?Wouldn't it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn't kill him, but if I had, I might have saved Hector's child. Dead or damned, that's the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don't have to make choices like that in Hades. There is no love there, nothing to betray.”
“The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. He had a special feeling for what he called the "correct miscalculation," for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers.”
“Just this once, in the very heart of the busiest of cities, everyone was perfectly content not to move and hardly to breathe. And for those few minutes, while the song lasted, Times Square was still as a meadow at evening, with the sun streaming in on the people there and the wind moving among them as if they were only tall blades of grass.”
“I doubted that I would be able to sleep. There were too many things to digest, too many images churning in my mind, but the moment my head touched the pillow, I began to lose consciousness. I felt as if I'd been clubbed, as if my skull had been crushed by a stone. Some stories are too terrible, perhaps, and the only way to let them into you is to escape, to turn your back on them and steal off into the darkness.”
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