Murder On The Orient Express Book Quotes

I had always wanted to go on the Orient Express, but that I’d sort of consider it a wasted opportunity if a murder didn’t happen. It’s not that I’m particularly bloodthirsty, it’s just that I have standards

And most conveniently she leaves her handkerchief behind!” said Poirot. “Exactly as it happens in the books and on the films—and to make things even easier for us it is marked with an initial.

I read a lot of Agatha Christie's that fall of 1938 - maybe all of them. The Hercule Poirots, the Miss Marples. Death on the Nile, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Murders .. on the links, .. at the vicarage, and.. on the Orient Express. I real them on the subway, at the deli, and in my bed alone. You can make what claims you will about the psychological nuance of Proust or the narrative scope of Tolstoy, but you can't argue that Mrs Christie fails to please. Her books are tremendously satisfying.

We will commit them to memory. We will become them. We become authors. We become their books. I am sorry. I lost something there. Like a path I was walking that dead-ended, and now I am alone and lost in the forest, and I am here and I do not know where here is anymore. You must learn a Shakespeare play: I will think of you as Titus Andronicus. Or you, whoever you are, you could learn an Agatha Christie novel: you will be Murder on the Orient Express.

We can read without seeing, and we can also read without understanding. What happens to our imaginations when we have lost the narrative thread in a story, when we breeze past words we don't understand, when we read words without knowing to what they refer? "When I am reading a sentence in a book that references something unknown to me (as when I have inadvertently skipped a passage), I feel as though I am reading a syntactically correct but semantically meaningless 'nonsense' sentence. The sentence feels meaningful -- it has the flavor of meaning -- and the structure of its grammar thrusts me forward through the sentence and on to the next, though in truth I understand (and picture) nothing. "How much of our reading takes place in such a suspension of meaning? How much time do we spend reading seemingly meaningful sentences without knowing their referents? How much of our reading takes place in such a void -- propelled by mere syntax? "All good books are, at heart, mysteries. (Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to tum a book's pages.) A book may be a literal mystery (Murder on the Orient Express, The Brothers Karamazov) or metaphysical mystery (Moby-Dick, Doctor Faustus) or a mystery of a purely architectonic kind -- a chronotopic mystery (Emma, The Odyssey). "These mysteries are narrative mysteries -- but books also defend their pictorial secrets ... "'Call me Ishmael ... ' "This statement invites more questions than it answers. We desire that Ishmael's face be, like the identity of one of Agatha Christie's murderers: "Revealed! "Writers of fiction tell us stories, and they also tell us how to read these stories. From a novel I assemble a series of rules -- not only a methodology for reading (a suggested hermeneutics) but a manner of cognition, all of which carries me through the text (and sometimes lingers after a book ends). The author teaches me how to imagine, as well as when to imagine, and how much.