If you confront anyone who has lied with the truth, he will usually admit it - often out of sheer surprise. It is only necessary to guess right to produce your effect.
Ah, but life is like that! It does not permit you to arrange and order it as you will. It will not permit you to escape emotion, to live by the intellect and by reason! You cannot say, 'I will feel so much and no more.' Life, Mr. Welman, whatever else it is, is not reasonable. [Hercule Poirot]
Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them. [Witness for the Prosecution, also published in The Hound of Death and Other Stories.]
You are the patient one, Mademoiselle,' said Poirot to Miss Debenham. She shrugged her shoulders slightly. 'What else can one do?' You are a philosopher, Mademoiselle.' That implies a detached attitude. I think my attitude is more selfish. I have learned to save myself useless emotion.
It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again." Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.
Lie is more worth living, more full of interest when you are likely to lose it. It shouldn't be, perhaps, but it is. When you're young and strong and healthy, and life stretches ahead of you, living isn't really important at all. It's young people who commit suicide easily, out of despair from love, sometimes from sheer anxiety and worry. But old people know how valuable life is and how interesting. - Jane Marple