“Miss Howard: Like a good detective story myself. Lots of nonsense written, though. Criminal discovered in last Chapter. Everyone dumbfounded. Real crime - you'd know at once.”

“You have a tendency, Hastings, to prefer the least likely. That, no doubt, is from reading too many detective stories.”

“Unless you are good at guessing, it is not much use being a detective.”

“A mother's love for her child is like nothing else in the world. It knows no law, no pity. It dares all things and crushes down remorselessly all that stands in its path. -The Last Seance (from The Hound of Death and Other Stories, also Double Sin and Other Stories)”

“There is, as Miss Marple would say, a lot of human nature in all of us.”

“Everyone is a potential murderer-in everyone there arises from time to time the wish to kill-though not the will to kill.”

“Heather Badcock meant no harm. She never did mean harm, but there is no doubt that people like Heather Badcock (and like my old friend Alison Wilde), are capable of doing a lot of harm because they lack - not kindness, they have kindness - but any real consideration for the way their actions may affect other people. She though always of what an action meant to her, never sparing a thought to what it might mean to somebody else.”