The Pale Horse (Ariadne Oliver, #5)

by Agatha Christie

It came to me suddenly that evil was, perhaps, necessarily always more impressive than good. It had to make a show! It had to startle and challenge! It was instability attacking stability. And in the end, I thought, stability will always win.

One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within twenty-four hours you nearly always come across it again.

“Of course I was brought up on the devil,” said Mrs. Oliver, apologetically. “Believing in him, I mean. But you know he always did seem to me so silly. With hoofs and a tail and all that. Capering about like a ham actor. Of course I often have a master criminal in my stories—people like it—but really he gets harder and harder to do. So long as one doesn’t know who he is, I can keep him impressive—but when it all comes out—he seems, somehow, so inadequate. A kind of anticlimax. It’s much easier if you just have a bank manager who’s embezzled the funds, or a husband who wants to get rid of his wife and marry the children’s governess. So much more natural—if you know what I mean.”

So much boasting. As a rule, in my experience, the really wicked don’t boast. They can keep quiet about their wickedness. It’s if your sins aren’t really bad that you want so much to talk about them.

Sin’s such a wretched, mean, ignoble little thing. It’s terribly necessary to make it seem grand and important.

But it’s a funny thing, that’s just what murderers can’t do. There they are, sitting pretty, safe as houses. But they can’t let well alone. I’m sure I don’t know why.”

“Evil is not something superhuman, it’s something less than human. Your criminal is someone who wants to be important, but who never will be important, because he’ll always be less than a man.”

Just parlour tricks done for money—and human life of no account. That’s real wickedness. Nothing grand or big—just petty and contemptible.”