Elephants Can Remember Quotes
"The trouble with Mrs. Oliver was—and she admitted it freely—that her styles of hairdressing were always being changed."
"Because, really, why put on a hat just to go to the country and have a meal with your friends?"
"Well, it's meant, I suppose. But it's got to be meant by me as well as the shop that sold it."
"I know what I can do and I know what I can't. I can't make speeches."
"I can do things with words so long as I know it's not a speech I'm making."
"Wonderful luck that was, Mrs. Oliver thought to herself."
"Question: 'I must tell you how very fond I am of reading your books and how wonderful I think they are.' Answer from flustered author: 'Well, that’s very kind. I am so glad.'"
"You should say 'Yes, I write well. I write better than anyone else who writes detective stories.'"
"What I’ve got to do is—I’ve got to get in touch with some elephants."
"There are some people who do remember. In fact, one does remember queer things."
"It is astonishing, really, how many people one does remember when one comes to look up names."
"I don’t throw away address books and things like that because so often you want one."
"All right, abandon the golden retriever. Concern yourself only with elephants."
"You’ve been given an assignment, not by someone you like, not by someone you wish to oblige, but someone you entirely dislike. That does not matter. You are still on a quest—a quest of knowledge."
"If I don’t get Sedgwick back, I shall go mad."
"I think you are very well equipped for what you propose to do."
"Oh, dear, I’m afraid I haven’t got that address."
"So difficult, isn’t it, trying to find people’s addresses."
"And then you naturally will talk about the things that were happening at that date, that you remember about."
"I’m sending you forth on your voyage of discovery."
"No. I wasn’t there at the time. I mean, I wasn’t in the house at the time."
"Yes, I’ll admit that. But the last thing I want to do is to offend you by seeking for information which is no business of mine to know."
"I think about it nearly all the time. I’m getting to have a thing about it, if you know what I mean."
"It's astonishing, you know, what dogs can know."
"Elephants, they always say, remember everything."
"You don't forget many things, do you, Nanny?"
"It's very interesting. One does. It's very interesting."
"And living so pleasantly together as they did."
"But look at what you read in the papers every day now."
"It seems to me perhaps as he might have had a blow on the head in India or something like that."
"Altogether, she’d had a lot of face treatment and you know, she looked so pretty in these wigs with curls on them."
"People say things, but then they want to say something when there’s been a tragedy of any kind."
"It is only natural that if one’s attention is drawn to them one should want to know."
"I mean, it’s not as though your death was going to do any good to anybody else."
"One wants to find out more about the people, and how can you know people separated from you by a gulf of years?"
"No. But they are still what you might describe perhaps as results."
"Elephants are large animals. They occupy a great deal of the horizon."
"What you mean is, only this is pure surmise on my part, Celia Ravenscroft does not want to marry you unless she is quite sure that there is no mental flaw passed to her presumably by her mother."
"The truth might be—a shock, a sorrow, and it might be that you would have said ‘why did I not leave all this behind? Why did I ask for knowledge? It is painful knowledge about which I can do nothing helpful or hopeful.’"
"It is not a disadvantage to love a mother and father."
"I will bring to light the truth and if it is, shall we say, truly the truth that you want, then I will deliver that knowledge to you."
"When I start an investigation I pursue it to the end."
"It is, I gather, a mental case you are interested in?" "A woman. Her name was Dorothea Preston-Grey."
"To see how alike they remained, how similar the things were that happened to them."
"They could be returned to live at home and with a suitable amount of attention, both medical and from those, usually near relatives, who were with them and could observe them living a normal life, everything would go well."
"I am sure now that I know what happened and why."
"Yes, I do. I suppose it's the feeling that one never knows what might be going to happen next."
"One cannot entirely forget such a sad thing."
"It is easier to hate where you have loved than it is to be indifferent where you have loved."
"There’s nothing to be ashamed of. He trusted me and relied on me, but he was never in love with me. You can love and serve and still be happy."
"There was sorrow here and death, but there was also love."
"It is not just imagining, it is not just wondering. There is a girl and a boy who care for each other and who are frightened of the future because of what may have happened and what there might be handed down from the father or the mother to the child."
"Old sins that had left long shadows. A beginning that had led years later to a tragic end."
"It is not necessarily only the young who suffer the pains of love and are ready to die for love."
"You must promise me, Alistair. I think I’m dying now. No—no, we won’t have time to get a doctor and a doctor couldn’t do anything. I’ve been lying here bleeding to death—and I’m very close to death. I know that, but promise me. Promise me you’ll save her. Promise me you won’t let the police arrest her. Promise me that she’ll not be tried for killing me, not shut up for life as a criminal."
"Justice has to be done and I have to be the executioner. The thing I want you to know is that I did—that I still do—love them both."
"I have broken my word. I never meant to reveal it to you or to anyone else. Monsieur Poirot made me feel differently."
"But I—I am glad to know, because now a great burden seems to have been lifted off me—"
"It was a tragedy of two people who loved each other. But they didn’t kill each other because they loved each other."
"Elephants can remember, but we are human beings, and mercifully human beings can forget."