Quotes from Laura Thompson

She can neither be ignored nor explained!

It's amazing what you can do, if you just study what people want to hear said and then say it to them!

plot, for Agatha, meant distillation of character.

It is beyond endurance, the continued life of things, when the owner of those things is dead.

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.

He had not, perhaps, understood that Agatha would mind so much; he might have believed that her independence would sustain her. She had money, a career, Rosalind, Carlo, Madge. She could travel if she wanted to. She had so much more in her life than a husband. That was part of the problem for him, after all: that she had so much else besides him.

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 . . .').

Of the 36 ways of avoiding disaster, running away is the best' (Old Chinese proverb, written down and kept by 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.