Agatha Christie

Thought is yours only. Nobody can alter or influence the use you mean to make of it.

Sitting here, literally amongst the dead, reckoning up gains and losses, casting accounts, I have come to see gains that cannot be reckoned in terms of wealth, and losses that are more damaging than loss of a crop... I look at the River and I see the lifeblood of Egypt that has existed before we lived and that will exist after we die... Life and death, Renisenb, are not of such great account.

We are ready to despair too soon, we are ready to say, __hat__ the good of doing anything?_ Hope is the virtue we should cultivate most in this present day and age.

...But even then you have to reckon with a criminal's chief vice.''What is that?'' Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.

It has been my experience, that women possess little or no pride where love affairs are concerned. Pride is a quality often on their lips, but not apparent in their actions.

One always has hope for human nature

Who was there to guard youth from pain and death - youth who could not, who had never been able to, guard itself? Did they know too little? Or was it that they knew too much, and therefore thought they knew it all?

He felt a strange pang. It was, perhaps, the fault of old Mr Jonathan, speaking of Juliet... No Juliet here - unless perhaps one could imagine Juliet a survivor - living on, deprived of Romeo... Was it not an essential part of Juliet's make-up that that she should die young?

Juliet singles out Romeo. Desdemona claims Othello. They have no doubts, the young, no fear, no pride.

Maybe it is because I am an old man, but I find, M. Poirot, that there is something about the defenselessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless - so sure. So generous and so demanding.

It is the courage, the insistence, the ruthless force of youth.

There is something about the defencelessness of youth that moves me to tears. Youth is so vulnerable. It is so ruthless--so sure. So generous and so demanding.

You are young still. Naturally, one tries this, that and the other, but what one eventually settles down into is the life one prefers.

I suppose, like most young people nowadays, boredom is what you dread most in the world, and yet, I can assure you, there are worse things.

And they had no idea that they and many others were automatically pronounced deadly dull solely on that account. Only by the young of course, but then, they would have thought indulgently, young people knew nothing about life. Poor dears, they were always worrying about examinations, or their sex life, or buying some extraordinary clothes, or doing some extraordinary things to their hair to make them more noticeable.

He has neither what I call the outward vision (seeing details all around you what is called an observant person) nor the inner vision--concentration, the focusing of the mind on one object. He has a purposefully limited vision. He sees only what blends and harmonises with the bent of his mind.

You are, madame, so perfectly armoured, so completely sure of yourself.''Now I wonder, if I am to take that as a compliment?''It is, perhaps, a warning--not to treat life with arrogance.

Papa always said that in the beginning men and women roamed the world together, equal in strength - like lions and tigers -""And giraffes?" interpolated Colonel Race slyly. I laughed. Everyone makes fun of that giraffe."And giraffes. They were nomadic, you see. It wasn't till they settled down in communities, and women did one kind of thing and men another, that women got weak. And of course, underneath, one is still the same - one feels the same, I mean - and that is why women worship physical strength in men - it's what they once had and have lost.""Almost ancestor worship, in fact?" "Something of the kind.""And you really think that's true? That women worship strength, I mean?""I think it's quite true - if one's honest. You think you admire moral qualities,but when you fall in love, you revert to the primitive where the physical is all that counts. But I don't think that's the end, if you lived in primitive conditions it would be all right, but you don't - and so, in the end, the other thing wins after all. It's the things that are apparently conquered that always do win, isn't it? They win in the only way that counts. Like what the Bible says about losing your life and finding it._.__n the end," said Colonel Race thoughtfully, "you fall in love - and you fall out of it, is that what you mean?""Not exactly, but you can put it that way if you like.