The ABC Murders

by Agatha Christie

‘A madman, mon ami, is to be taken seriously. A madman is a very dangerous thing.’

‘It’s like all those quiet people, when they do lose their tempers they lose them with a vengeance.

We cannot catch a train earlier than the time that it leaves,

‘Words, mademoiselle, are only the outer clothing of ideas.’

It’s often when you’re talking over things that you seem to see your way clear. Your mind gets made up for you sometimes without your knowing how it’s happened. Talking leads to a lot of things one way and another.’

One’s body is a nuisance, M. Poirot, especially when it gets the upper hand.

We must look within and not without for the truth.

there is nothing so dangerous for anyone who has something to hide as conversation! Speech, so a wise old Frenchman said to me once, is an invention of man’s to prevent him from thinking. It is also an infallible means of discovering that which he wishes to hide. A human being, Hastings, cannot resist the opportunity to reveal himself and express his personality which conversation gives him. Every time he will give himself away.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I enjoyed the war. What I had of it, that was. I felt, for the first time, a man like anybody else. We were all in the same box. I was as good as anyone else.’

To say a man does mad things because he is mad is merely unintelligent and stupid. A madman is as logical and reasoned in his actions as a sane man—given his peculiar biased point of view. For example, if a man insists on going out and squatting about in nothing but a loin cloth his conduct seems eccentric in the extreme. But once you know that the man himself is firmly convinced that he is Mahatma Gandhi, then his conduct becomes perfectly reasonable and logical.