The Pale Horse Quotes

“What I wanted, frankly, was someone who would argue me out of the things that I was thinking.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“I avoided my own friends and acquaintances, yet the loneliness of my existence was insupportable.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“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”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“The supernatural seems supernatural. But the science of tomorrow is the supernatural of today.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Life is always dangerous—never forget that. In the end, perhaps, not only great natural forces, but the work of our own hands may destroy it.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“People are so proud of their wickedness. Odd, isn't it, that people who are good are never proud of it?”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“She looked at nobody, but just before she went out, she raised her eyes and took a speedy glance at me. There was something in that looks that startled me - though it was difficult to describe why. There was malice in it, and a curious intimate knowledge. I felt that, without effort, and almost without curiosity, she had known exactly what thoughts were in my mind.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Being in love has a very bad effect on men - it seems to addle their wits.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“I reminded myself, how did I know that my view was the right one? Who was I to pronounce it a wasted life? Perhaps it was my life, my quiet scholarly life, immersed in books, shut off from the world, that was the wasted one.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“What beats me—it always does—is how a man can be so clever and yet be such a perfect fool.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“One of the oddest things in life, as we all know, is the way that when you have heard a thing mentioned, within 24 hours you nearly always come across it again”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“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.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“After all, the stupidest child can set a house on fire quite easily.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“One needs some really good food and drink after all the magnificent blood and gloom of Macbeth. Shakespeare always makes me ravenous”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“To a historian that always is a difficulty. At what point in history does one particular portion of history begin”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Come, come,' said Venables. 'I really can't go along with this modern playing down of evil as something that doesn't really exist. There is evil. And evil is powerful. Sometimes more powerful than good. It's there. It has to be recognised—and fought. Otherwise—' he spread out his hands. 'We go down to darkness.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“The wickedness was never there - not in the sense it was supposed to be. No fantastic trafficking with the Devil, no black and evil splendour. Just parlour tricks done for money - and human life of no account. That's real wickedness. Nothing grand or big - just petty and contemptible.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Your criminal is someone who wants to be important, but who never will be important, because he’ll always be less than a man.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Là vous touchez à l'endroit sensible, admit Davis. La moindre allusion à la folie dans un manuscrit et les acteurs sont déchaînés ! C'est la même chose quand il est question de mort subite. Pas un comédien n'accepte de mourir tranquillement. Il lui faut râler, se tordre, rouler des yeux blancs, s'agripper la poitrine, se saisir la tête à pleines mains, enfin, se donner en spectacle.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“I didn't mean her either. I meant the Sybil one. She seems just silly. All those beads and draperies and all the stuff about voodoo, and all those fantastic reincarnations she was telling us about. (Why is it that anybody who was a kitchen maid or an ugly old peasant never seems to get reincarnated? It's always Egyptian Princesses or beautiful Babylonian slaves. Very fishy.) But all the same, though she's stupid, I have a feeling that she could really do things—make queer things happen. I always put things badly—but I mean she could be used—by something—in a way just because she is so silly. I don't suppose anyone understands what I mean,’ she finished pathetically.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“One imagines a mastermind,’ I said, ‘as some grand and sinister figure of evil.’

Lejeune shook his head. ‘It's not like that at all,’ he said. ‘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.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“I'd say he's gone over the edge now. He wasn't to begin with, of course, but it does something to you, you know. Killing people. It makes you feel powerful and larger than life. It makes you feel you're God Almighty. But you're not. You're only a nasty bit of goods that's been found out.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Lejeune shook his head. “It’s not like that at all,” he said. “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.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Ritual—a pattern of words and phrases sanctified by time and usage, has an effect on the human spirit. What causes the mass hysteria of crowds? We don’t know exactly. But it’s a phenomenon that exists. These old-time usages, they have their part—a necessary part, I think.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“You bet me a certain sum that Aunt Eliza will be hale and hearty still next Christmas, I bet you that she won’t.” The beady eyes were on me, watching…. “Nothing against that, is there? Simple. We have an argument on the subject. I say Aunt E. is lined up for death, you say she isn’t. We draw up a contract and sign it. I give you a date. I say that a fortnight either way from that date Auntie E.’s funeral service will be read. You say it won’t. If you’re right—I pay you. If you’re wrong, you—pay me!”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“But she might, she just might, be something more... something that's lasted on from a very early age and which crops up now and then in country places. It's frightening when it does, because there's real malevolence - not just a desire to impress.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“My husband's a very good man," she said. "Besides being the vicar, I mean. And that makes things difficult sometimes. Good people, you see, don't really understand evil." She paused and then said with a kind of brisk efficiency, "I think it had better be me.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“here are only two things that are wanted badly enough to risk damnation. The love potion or the cup of poison." "Ah." "So simple, isn't it? Love - and death. The love potion to win the man you want, the black mass to keep your lover. A draught to be taken at the full of the moon. Recite the names of devils or of spirits. Draw patterns on the floor or on the wall. All that's window dressing. The truth is the aphrodisiac in the draught!" "And death?" I asked. "Death?" She laughed, a queer little laugh that made me uncomfortable. "Are you so interested in death?" "Who isn't?" I said lightly. "I wonder." She shot me a glance, keen, searching. It took me aback. "Death. There's always been a greater trade in that than there ever has been in love potions. And yet - how childish it all was in the past! The Borgias and their famous secret poisons. Do you know what they really used? Ordinary white arsenic! Just the same as any little wife poisoner in the back streets. But we've progressed a long way beyond that nowadays. Science has enlarged our frontiers." "With untraceable poisons?" My voice was sceptical. "Poisons! That's vieux jeu. Childish stuff. There are new horizons." "Such as?" "The mind. Knowledge of what the mind is - what it can do - what it can be made to do.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“Say what you like, it's not natural for five or six people to be on the spot when B is murdered and all to have a motive for killing B – unless, that is, B is absolutely madly unpleasant and in that case nobody will mind whether he's been killed or not, and doesn't care in the least who's done it.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse

“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. Stability can survive the triteness of Good Fairy Diamond; the flat voice, the rhymed couplet, even the irrelevant vocal statement of "There's a winding road runs down the hill, To the olde world town I love." All very poor weapons it would seem, and yet those weapons would inevitably prevail. The pantomime would end in the way it always ended. The staircase, and the descending cast in order of seniority, with Good Fairy Diamond, practising the Christian virtue of humility and not seeking to be first (or in this case, last) but arriving about halfway through the procession, side by side with her late opponent, now seen to be no longer the snarling Demon King breathing fire and brimstone, but just a man dressed up in red tights.”
― Agatha Christie, The Pale Horse