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Mon ami, if you wish to catch a rabbit you put a ferret into the hole, and if the rabbit is there he runs. That is all I have done.
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The impossible cannot have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.
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And Mr. Burnaby said acutely: 'Well, it doesn't seem to have done her much good, poor lass.' But after a while they stopped talking about her and discussed instead who was going to win the Grand National. For, as Mr. Ferguson was saying at that minute in Luxor, it is not the past that matters but the future.
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But how much are the delicate convolutions of the brain influenced by the digestive apparatus? When the mal de mere seizes me I, Hercule Poirot, am a creature with no grey cells, no order, no method - a mere member of the human race somewhere below average intelligence!
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It was abominable - wicked. The good God should not allow such things. We are not so wicked as that in Germany.
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Ah, but it is incredible how often things force one to do the thing one would like to do.
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One has occasionally to pocket one’s pride and readjust one’s ideas.
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Exactly! It is absurd - improbable - it cannot be. So I myself have said. And yet, my friend, there it is! one cannot escape from the facts.
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Poirot twinkled at her gently.
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If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, they usually admit it - often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.
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Flattery, in Tuppence’s opinion, should always be laid on with a trowel where a man is concerned.
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What any woman saw in some particular man was beyond the comprehension of the average intelligent male. It just was so. A woman who could be intelligent about everything else in the world could be a complete fool when it came to some particular man.
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She came in with coffee and biscuits at half-past eleven with her mouth pursed up very prunes and prisms, and would hardly speak to me.
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I aroused Judith’s contempt by asking what good all this was likely to do to mankind? There is no question that annoys your true scientist more.
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'It is the kind of thing that happens to you when you are stupid,' said Esa. 'Things go entirely differently from the way you planned them.'
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'You have been to the Riviera before, Georges?' said Poirot to his valet the following morning. George was an intensely English, rather wooden-faced individual. 'Yes, sir. I was here two years ago when I was in the service of Lord Edward Frampton.' 'And to-day,' murmured his master, 'you are here with Hercule Poirot. How one mounts in the world!'
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'Mademoiselle,' I said, 'it is sometimes difficult for a dog to find a scent, but once he has found it, nothing on earth will make him leave it! That is if he is a good dog! And I, mademoiselle, I, Hercule Poirot, am a very good dog.'
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Remember, he was a fanatic, and there is no fanatic like a religious fanatic.
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'No,' said Miss Marple. 'Murder isn’t a game.
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'I like to see an angry Englishman,' said Poirot. 'They are very amusing. The more emotional they feel the less command they have of language.'
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I don't think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.
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Pilar sat squeezed up against the window and thought how very odd the English smelt.
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I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairing, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.
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'Darling,' she drawled, 'won’t that be rather tiresome? If any misfortunes happen to my friends I always drop them at once! It sounds heartless, but it saves such a lot of trouble later!'