More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It was almost impossible to recognise the seedy Ascher in this smart young man with the military bearing. I recalled the leering drunken old man, and the toil-worn face of the dead woman—and I shivered a little at the remorselessness of time….
His quietness was more impressive than any heroics could have been.
“Madness, Hastings, is a terrible thing…I am afraid…I am very much afraid….”
when a young girl is dead, that is the kind of thing that is said. She was bright. She was happy. She was sweet-tempered. She had not a care in the world. She had no undesirable acquaintances. There is a great charity always to the dead. Do you know what I should like this minute? I should like to find someone who knew Elizabeth Barnard and who does not know she is dead! Then, perhaps, I should hear what is useful to me—the truth.”
“Oh! I’m the plain one of the family. I’ve always known that.” She seemed to brush aside the fact as unimportant.
“It’s like all those quiet people, when they do lose their tempers they lose them with a vengeance.
His mind, shrinking from reality, ran for safety along these unimportant details.
“Who are you? You don’t belong to the police?” “I am better than the police,” said Poirot. He said it without conscious arrogance. It was, to him, a simple statement of fact.
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.”
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.
At the time of a murder people select what they think is important. But quite frequently they think wrong!”
“Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.”
“Do you know, Hastings, I cannot rid my mind of the impression that already, in our conversations this afternoon, something was said that was significant.
“No—not at Churston…Before that…
The girl explained that she, too, had come up from Bexhill. “I wanted to ask Mr. Clarke something.” She seemed rather anxious to excuse and explain her procedure.
Lily squeezed tighter. “Come on then!” “All right—half a minute. I must just telephone from the station.” “Who to?” “A girl I was going to meet.” She slipped across the road, and rejoined him three minutes later, looking rather flushed.
In my day if a man was mad he was mad and we didn’t look about for scientific terms to soften it down. I suppose a thoroughly up-to-date doctor would suggest putting a man like A B C in a nursing home, telling him what a fine fellow he was for forty-five days on end and then letting him out as a responsible member of society.”
“I wonder where he is at this minute,” said the Assistant Commissioner.
Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking.
A madman is as logical and reasoned in his actions as a sane man—given his peculiar biased point of view.
But what is often called an intuition is really an impression based on logical deduction or experience. When an expert feels that there is something wrong about a picture or a piece of furniture or the signature on a cheque he is really basing that feeling on a host of small signs and details. He has no need to go into them minutely—his experience obviates that—the net result is the definite impression that something is wrong. But it is not a guess, it is an impression based on experience.
