"He dragged me back - just in time. A tree had crashed down on to the side walk, just missing us. Poirot stared at it, pale and upset. "It was a near thing that! But clumsy, all the same - for I had no suspicion - at least hardly any suspicion. Yes, but for my quick eyes, the eyes of a cat, Hercule Poirot might now be crushed out of existence - a terrible calamity for the world. And you, too, mon ami - though that would not be such a national catastrophe." "Thank you," I said coldly."

"I mean that success has come early. And that is dangerous. Always dangerous."

"Use that fluff of yours you call a brain."

"Don't you know, you idiot, that that is what every fool of a woman says about her child?Miss Bulstrode's thoughts."

"You have a great advantage as a writer, Monsieur,' said Poirot. 'You can relieve your feelings by expedient of the printed word. You have the power of the pen over your enemies."

"Everything that has existed, lingers in the Eternity."

"I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays and have things arranged for them that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas."

"Murder can sometimes seem justified, but it is murder all the same. You are truthful and clear-minded--face the truth, mademoiselle! Your friend died in the last resort, because she had not the courage to live. We may sympathize with her. We may pity her. But the fact remains--the act was hers--not another."

"It's astonishing in this world how things don't turn out at all the way you expect them to."

"The great thing in these cases is to keep an absolutely open mind. Most crimes, you see, are so absurdly simple."

"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."

"Who can tell? It may be that there must always be growth - and that if one does not grow kinder and wiser and greater, then the growth must be the other way, fostering the evil things. Or it may be that the life they all led was too shut in, too folded back upon itself - without breadth or vision. Or it may be that, like a disease of crops, it is contagious, that first one and then another is sickened."

"Too much mercy... often resulted in further crimes which were fatal to innocent victims who need not have been victims if justice had been put first and mercy second."

"Evil never goes unpunished, Monsieur. But the punishment is sometimes secret."

"It seems odd that as far as I know nobody has yet been murdered for having too perfect a character! And yet perfection is undoubtedly an irritating thing!"

"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."

"The man who came into the room did not look as though his name was, or could have ever been, Robinson. It might have been Demetrius, or Isaacstein, or Perenna - though not one or the other in particular. He was not definitely Jewish, nor definitely Greek nor Portugese nor Spanish, nor South American. What did seem highly unlikely was that he was an Englishman called Robinson."

"Everything is possible, isn't it? The world soon teaches one that!"

"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."

"That is the word of reality - need."

"Vous eprouves trop d'emotion, Hastings, It affects your hands and your wits. Is that a way to fold a coat? And regard what you have done to my pyjamas. If the hairwash breaks what will befall them?''Good heavens, Poirot,' I cried, 'this is a matter of life and death. What does it matter what happens to our clothes?''You have no sense of proportion Hastings. We cannot catch a train earlier than the time that it leaves, and to ruin one's clothes will not be the least helpful in preventing a murder."

"But I know human nature, my friend, and I tell you that, suddenly confronted with the possibility of being tried for murder, the most innocent person will lose his head and do the most absurd things."

"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."

"People bicker so and have such rows. Even if they're fond of each other, they still seem to have rows and not to mind a bit whether they have them in public or not."

"Eh bien, then, you are crazy, or appear crazy or you think you are crazy, and possibly you may be crazy."

"Why do you decry the world we live in? There are good people in it. Isn't muddle a better breeding ground for kindliness and individuality than a world order that's imposed, a world order that may be right today and wrong tomorrow? I would rather have a world of kindly, faulty, human beings, than a world of superior robots who've said goodbye to pity and understanding and sympathy."

"These little grey cells. It is up to them."

"What an absurdity to go and bury oneself in South America, where they are always having revolutions."

"I'm sorry, but I do hate this differentiation between the sexes. 'The modern girl has a thoroughly businesslike attitude to life' That sort of thing. It's not a bit true! Some girls are businesslike and some aren't. Some men are sentimental and muddle-headed, others are clear-headed and logical. There are just different types of brains."

"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!"

"Where do one's fears come from? Where do they shape themselves? Where do they hide before coming out into the open?"

"There are questions that you don't ask because you're afraid of the answers to them."

"I know there's a proverb which that says 'To err is human,' but a human error is nothing to what a computer can do if it tries."

"I suppose what I really am is restless. I want to go everywhere, see everything, do everything. I want to find something. Yes, that's it, I want to find something."

"In fact there is only your own instinct? Not instinct, Hastings. Instinct is a bad word. It is my knowledge-my experience-that tells me that something about that letter is wrong."

"I have no pity for myself either. So let it be Veronal. But I wish Hercule Poirot had never retired from work and come here to grow vegetable marrows."

"If you place your head in a lion's mouth, then you cannot complain one day if he happens to bite it off."

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

"Living alone, with no one to consult or talk to, one might easily become melodramatic, and imagine things which had no foundation on fact."

"Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions."

"How true is the saying that man was forced to invent work in order to escape the strain of having to think."

"It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down."

"A man travels fastest who travels alone."

"Whether he acted rightly or not, I have never been sure. It was the future of a child that was at stake. A child, he felt, ought to be given the benefit of a doubt."

"Plots come to me at such odd moments, when I am walking along the street, or examining a hat shop, suddenly a splendid idea comes into my head."

"She didn't want to die. She couldn't imagine wanting to die. Death was for-for other people."

"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."

"One of the saddest things in life, is the things one remembers."

"Popular feeling is very often sentimental, muddle-headed, and eminently unsound, but it cannot be disregarded for all that."