Laura Thompson > Quotes

“One of the oddest things in life, I think, is the things one remembers. One chooses to remember, I suppose. Something in one must choose.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Girls were always attracted to middle-aged men with interesting pasts.’ The relationship is all about hero-worship on one side, youth-worship on the other,”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“At her very first attempt Agatha had understood – or intuited – that a clue based upon character has double the value.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“will never be called upon to enact: the mainstream is”
― Laura Thompson, The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters

“Stirling formed a de facto private army that would cross picket lines in the event of a Communist coup. Michael”
― Laura Thompson, A Different Class of Murder: The Story of Lord Lucan

“she pronounced in an interview in 1964.10 ‘My father was a gentleman of substance, and never did a hand’s turn in his life, and he was a most agreeable man.’ He was also a fool, although not intellectually stupid by any means. He knew exactly the worth of the people around him, but it was not in his nature to present to them anything other than his ‘agreeable’ front.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery

“with you, criticise you, eat with you, quarrel with you, laugh with you, exchange ideas with you and find life more and more exciting because of you . . . you are one of the people and things (for you are a thing) that I valued, and found good in life .”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“You’ve got to go on living whether you like it or not’; ‘God may need you.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“The men of her family – Frederick, Monty – were lovable and weak. The women could see life for what it was and bear it.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“It’s amazing what you can do, if you just study what people want to hear said and then say it to them!”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Expect the worst, because the worst is so often true, but have belief, have faith, have compassion.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“the madness of exchanging mediocre but safe happiness for great happiness but possible disaster.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Of the 36 ways of avoiding disaster, running away is the best’
(Old Chinese proverb, written down and kept by Agatha Christie)”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“God in Heaven listen to me, Listen to my whisper’d prayer Make me worthy, though so lowly, All his love and life to share.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“the creativity – and competitiveness – within Agatha would not be stilled. Her life was enchantingly ordinary. Her imagination was fierce and unstoppable.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“the loss of certainty as a child had prepared Clara to expect the worst;”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Later, she also saw that innocence need be nothing of the kind, and that conventional morality might have its own impurity.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“It is beyond endurance, the continued life of things, when the owner of those things is dead.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“I am sure there is more to know Something to love Something to dream of Something to make And with that you can walk You can walk in the wood In the cool of the eve And when God walks beside you You are not afraid,”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Right from the start she realised the potential of the idea that she would always use to such effect: that of fastening suspicion so firmly to one person that the reader eliminates him or her, only to find that here, indeed, is the culprit. She deployed this device as no other writer has since, with the utmost logic and liberality: the murderer is absent from the scene of the crime (as in Styles), or appears to be the intended victim, or is the narrator of the story, or a person incapacitated by a gunshot wound, or is a child, or a policeman; the key, with Agatha, being that blessed element of the ordinary which gives the device an illusion of reality. That she had a gift for plotting coups was undeniable. The genre had a magical effect upon her ability to structure; although this was not achieved without a great deal of work, which interested her in the manner of wrestling with an intricate mathematical equation, as she had done as a child with her father.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“having once committed the sin of despair she was determined to believe in the blessing of life (‘And when God walks beside you/You are not afraid . . .’).”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“she was lying about herself to find out the truth about herself.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“The new world was the same as the old. The houses were different, the streets were called Closes, the clothes were different, the voices were different, but the human beings were the same as they always had been.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Pleasant, polite, utterly normal. Yet in the Daily Mail an expoliceman had written this about her: ‘One great difficulty is that the search is for a woman with certain attributes that are not common to the ordinary individual. She is talented. She is a woman who by the very nature of her work would have an exceptionally elastic brain. Consequently one would expect her, consciously or subconsciously, to do something extraordinary.’ Well that, she thought, was really rather nice.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“She craved solitude, but not infinite solitude.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“She can neither be ignored nor explained!”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“nothing has ever happened to Miss Marple. Everything happens around her, and this is the point: she has become wise through observation, not through experience.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Half the troubles in life come from pretending to oneself that one is a better and finer human being than one is’;”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“she saw imaginatively rather than accurately.”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie

“Right from the start she realised the potential of the idea that she would always use to such effect: that of fastening suspicion so firmly to one person that the reader eliminates him or her, only to find that here, indeed, is the culprit. She deployed this device as no other writer has since, with the utmost logic and liberality: the murderer is absent from the scene of the crime (as in Styles), or appears to be the intended victim, or is the narrator of the story, or a person incapacitated by a gunshot wound, or is a child, or a policeman; the key, with Agatha, being that blessed element of the ordinary which gives the device an illusion of reality. That she had a gift for plotting coups was undeniable. The genre had a magical effect upon her ability to structure; although this was not achieved without a great deal of work, which interested her in the manner of wrestling with an intricate mathematical equation, as she had”
― Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie