“You say your life is your own. But can you dare to ignore the chance that you are taking part in a gigantic drama under the orders of a divine Producer? Your cue may not come till the end of the play--it may be totally unimportant, a mere walking-on part, but upon it may hang the issues of the play if you do not give the cue to another player. The whole edifice may crumple. You as you, may not matter to anyone in the world, but you as a person in a particular place may matter unimaginably.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“Sometimes one sees things clearly years afterwards than one could possibly at the time.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“Is death the greatest evil that can happen to anyone?”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“In moments of great stress, the mind focuses itself upon some quite unimportant matter which is remembered long afterwards with the utmost fidelity, driven in, as it were, by the mental stress of the moment. It may be some quite irrelevant detail, like the pattern of a wallpaper, but it will never be forgotten.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“To get at the cause for a thing, we must study the effect.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“Nobody knows what another person is thinking. They may imagine they do, but they are nearly always wrong.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“There are, of course, the people who revolve around themselves--but I agree with you, she's not one of that kind. She's totally uninterested in herself. And yet she's got a strong character--there must be something. I thought at first it was her art--but it isn't. I've never met anyone so detached from life. That's dangerous.'
'Dangerous? What do you mean?'
'Well, you see--it must mean an obsession of some kind, and obsessions are always dangerous.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“Sixty-nine was an interesting age--an age of infinite possibilities--an age when at last the experience of a lifetime was beginning to tell. But to feel old--that was different, a tired, discouraged state of mind when one was inclined to ask oneself depressing questions. What was he after all? A little dried-up elderly man, with neither chick nor child, with no human belongings, only a valuable Art collection which seemed at the moment strangely unsatisfying. No one to care whether he lived or died...”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“I mean that success has come early. And that is dangerous. Always dangerous.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“You may put it that way if you like—but damn it all, it’s my life. I’ve a right to do what I like with it.” “That is a cliché,” said Mr. Satterthwaite wearily.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“The eye is diverted from the real business, it is caught by the spectacular action that means nothing--nothing at all.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“She's very selfish. Not exactly self-centered, but totally indifferent to everyone and everything. Don't you agree?'
'I don't think that's possible,' said Mr Satterthwaite, slowly. 'I mean everyone's interest must go somewhere.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“He was not fond of young people in herds. He thought them uninteresting and crude.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“What was he after all? A little dried-up elderly man, with neither chick nor child, with no human belongings, only a valuable Art collection which seemed at the moment strangely unsatisfying. No one to care whether he lived or died… At this point in his meditations Mr Satterthwaite pulled himself up short. What he was thinking was morbid and unprofitable. He knew well enough, who better, that the chances were that a wife would have hated him or alternatively that he would have hated her, that children would have been a constant source of worry and anxiety, and that demands upon his time and affection would have worried him considerably. ‘To be safe and comfortable,’ said Mr Satterthwaite firmly–that was the thing. The”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“¿Quién puede afirmar que aquel niño no podría haberse convertido en un gran músico o en el descubridor de la vacuna contra el cáncer? O algo menos melodramático: podría convertirse en una persona feliz y normal...”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“Thought is yours only. Nobody can alter or influence the use you mean to make of it.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“... suppose if something very terrible had happened, so terrible as to be almost unbearable, one might get like that. One might run away from reality into a half world of one's own and then, of course, after a time, one wouldn't be able to get back...”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“one of the worst things in the world today, the unkindness of woman to woman. You”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“He was clearly marked with the stamp of the Philistine.”
― Agatha Christie, quote from The Mysterious Mr. Quin
“It’s the Thanksgiving rule. That’s another life tip.” “Explain,” I said. “Oh, Thanksgiving is this massive meal that usually takes someone about three days to prepare, and then everyone sits down and eats it in about fifteen minutes. The trick is to learn to take your time with Thanksgiving. You have to get everyone to promise that they won’t get up for anything for at least an hour. Maybe two.”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
“he needed to have sex at least once a day or he would suffer awful headaches.”
― Bill O'Reilly, quote from Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot
“In that time while he was still aware, which was the worse, I wonder: the agony of his physical torture or the horror of their utter hatred, of their moral certainty that he was so beyond the bounds of what they could accept that he deserved not just a death but one of such brutality, such inhumanity, as would make the seraphs who burned Sodom bow their heads in cold respect? What is it like, I wonder, to learn the full capacity of hatred in a lesson hammered home with bone broken on wood and skin ripped on barbed wire?”
― Hal Duncan, quote from Vellum
“As long as I'm between home and the clinic I do all right. But out in the real world, I feel like prey. I slink around and can feel people looking at me. I feel their eyes boring into me. I feel what they're thinking: Watch her, she could go off anytime. But within the walls of my farmhouse, I climb out of the protective shell, my arms slowly rise like a phoenix, and I dance, wail, fly around the room and then collapse, crying, in front of my mirrors. I start to see in the mirror what it is I really look like, instead of what I was trained from the womb to see. I do not write about it. I do not talk about it. I do not know what I am doing. But just like a baby bird, I am blinking once-sealed eyes and unfolding damp wings. I cannot articulate the past. A part of me knows it's there, lurking, just behind what I can acknowledge, but it is not within sight. And I am keeping it that way. ”
― quote from Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood
“Prodigies! Geniuses! Artists! The lumer-lumpen are some of the most sensitive, the most brilliant, the wisest creatures on the earth or inside of it. There is more wisdom in the head of a lumpen than you will find in all the libraries of the world...If only they could speak...”
― Lauren Oliver, quote from The Spindlers
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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