Closed Casket (New Hercule Poirot Mysteries #2)

by Sophie Hannah

Conceal and reveal: how appropriate that those two words should rhyme. They sound like opposites and yet, as all good storytellers know, much can be revealed by the tiniest attempts at concealment, and new revelations often hide as much as they make plain.

Human beings, I have noticed, like to follow patterns, and I am no exception. Since so much of what I do in my daily life is not anything I would ever undertake by choice, I tend to assume that if something crops up that I would prefer not to do, that means I will certainly do it.

“One ought not to use words carelessly, or even spontaneously. Once they are launched, they cannot be called back.

Bitterness emanates from her as she stomps around the house feeling aggrieved on her own behalf,

One can, you see, insist that the truth is true in a way that makes it appear a lie.”

“People are peculiar little machines, Edward,” she whispered to me. “Considerably more peculiar than anything else in the world.”

“Good sense appears the most underhand of tactics to a man who has no reserves of his own to draw upon.”

Sometimes the brain forgets what it has more recently discovered, and reverts to prior false knowledge of what turned out to be untrue.

“You see, in the normal run of things, people who lie as easily as they breathe never admit to it. They have an endless capacity to invent new lies to explain the old ones. It is not a moral problem, in my opinion, so much as a mental illness.