All Quotes

"What governs one's choice of memories? Life is like sitting in a cinema. Flick! Here am I, a child eating éclairs on my birthday. Flick! Two years have passed and I am sitting on my grandmother's lap, being solemnly trussed up as a chicken just arrived from Mr Whiteley's, and almost hysterical with the wit of the joke. Just moments — and in between long empty spaces of months or even years."

"We never know the whole man, though sometimes, in quick flashes, we know the true man. I think, myself, that one's memories represent those moments which, insignificant as they may seem, nevertheless represent the inner self and oneself as most really oneself. I am today the same person as that solemn little girl with pale flaxen sausage-curls. The house in which the spirit dwells, grows, develops instincts and tastes and emotions and intellectual capacities, but I myself, the true Agatha, am the same. I do not know the whole Agatha. The whole Agatha, so I believe, is known only to God."

"To be part of something one doesn't in the least understand is, I think, one of the most intriguing things about life. I like living. I have sometimes been wildly despairing, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing."

"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is to have a happy childhood. I had a very happy childhood. I had a home and a garden that I loved; a wise and patient Nanny; as father and mother two people who loved each other dearly and made a success of their marriage and of parenthood. Looking back I feel that our house was truly a happy house. That was largely due to my father, for my father was a very agreeable man."

"The quality of agreeableness Is not much stressed nowadays. People tend to ask if a man is clever, industrious, if he contributes to the well-being of the community, if he ‘counts’ in the scheme of things."

"Servants, of course, were not a particular luxury–it was not a case of only the rich having them; the only difference was that the rich had more."

"We had three servants, which was a minimum then."

"I don't think necessity is the mother of invention — invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble."

"Looking back, it seems to me extraordinary that we should have contemplated having both a nurse and a servant, but they were considered essentials of life in those days, and were the last things we would have thought of dispensing with. To have committed the extravagance of a car, for instance, would never have entered our minds. Only the rich had cars."

"An archaeologist is the best husband any woman can have; the older she gets, the more interested he is in her."

"It is ridiculous to set a detective story in New York City. New York City is itself a detective story."

"I loved mysteries and read all of Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle."

"Alongside politicians and the press, writers of fiction picked up the theme of a sinister Communist threat, a theme that drew on the intelligence wars between the Soviet Union and the West. John Buchan, a Scottish novelist who had served in intelligence during World War One before becoming an MP, saw the hidden hand of a Communist plot to take over the world. In her novel The Big Four (1927), Agatha Christie, a successful British novelist, referred to ‘the world-wide unrest, the labour troubles that beset every nation, and the revolutions that break out in some’. The sense of menace played an important role in imaginative fiction. It took forward the pre-war strand of spy fiction, but added a theme of social disorder. There was also frequently a racial dimension, with a tendency to depict hostile figures as Slav and Jewish, frequently in league with sinister elements in British (or French or American) society. This theme drew on a broader hostility to Jews that was given renewed energy by the association of the Russian Revolution in hostile eyes with them. Russian émigrés spread this assessment. In turn, there was similar material in the Soviet Union about Western plots to overthrow the Revolution, a theme that long continued."

"It is well-known that Agatha Christie was not so much a novelist as the inventor of a novelty, a peculiarly intricate and entertaining type of puzzle. All the complexity and originality she could muster went into the construction of the story; her characters, apart from a handful of principals, are rarely more than cyphers."

"Until about 1957, Agatha Christie's plots were ingeniously composed of interlocking segments. This was the area in which she excelled; her tone and style have always been less satisfactory. The former is often whimsical or sententious, the latter unremittingly bland. She was involved in the delineation of a world of safety and complacence where the precise moment of a misdeed could be established by reference to an unfailing custom."

"If Agatha Christie the detective writer can be said to have taken characters out of a box, here in a few pages she shows how deftly she could bring individuals to life."

"Above all she is a literary conjuror who places her pasteboard characters face downwards and shuffles them with practised cunning."

"Perhaps her greatest strength was that she never overstepped the limits of her talent. She knew precisely what she could do and she did it well... Her prime skill as a storyteller is the talent to deceive."

"On vacations, I will take a giant stack of Agatha Christie novels and read one every day. I never remember who this killer is, even when I've read it before, and I always have to stay up to finish because I HAVE TO FIND OUT. I don’t know how she does it."

"I do not know anyone who has, in such a supreme degree, what I would call Mrs. Christie's despatch. She wields her humane-killer with a butcher-like indifference to life; her murders are clean, explicit, feline. "But above the ear was a tiny hole with an incrustation of dried blood round it." That is the typical Christie sentence for such occasions. It was almost Websterian. Her pistols seem poetic toys, the knives are surgical instruments; there is a housewifely neatness in the slaughterhouse. The very style is cut to pattern... She is neither too short nor too long, too tough nor too tender; she is energetic, decisive, and slightly catty where women are concerned."

"Will Agatha Christie plays stand the test of time like those of Somerset Maugham or Noel Coward? They may date, as indeed have Murder at the Vicarage, which has now been running for two years at the Savoy, and The Mousetrap, in its twenty-sixth year at St. Martin's. But they do recall a visual nostalgia for a middle-class way of life that will never return to England. Of spacious chintzy country houses, cultivated morning-room talk, impeccable servants, bowls of potpourri, croquet on the lawn, Earl Grey tea poured from Georgian silver, and wafer-thin brown bread cucumber sandwiches. Perhaps this is what many of us are longing for."

"The people in Agatha Christie's books look back, more than those of any other modern writer, to the world of her childhood and adolescence, that time when social life was settled and people knew their places in it. Her love for Ashfield, the sizeable villa in Torquay where she grew up, is responsible for the many country houses in her books. She reflected late in her life that one of the things she would miss most, if she were a modern child, would be the absence of servants, and there are dozens of servants in her stories; butlers and housekeepers, housemaids and under-housemaids, gardeners and odd-job men... She was looking back always to a style of behaviour that had ended in 1914."

"Smash is the way you feel all alone, Like an outcast you're out on your own. Smash is the way you deal with your life, Like an outcast you're smashing your strife"

"Such was England as represented by Mayhem Parva. It was, of course, a mythical kingdom, a fly-in-amber land. It was derived in part from the ways and values of a society that had begun to fade away from the very moment of the shots at Sarajevo; in part from that remarkably durable sentimentality which, even today, can be expressed in the proposition that every church clock has stopped at 14.50 hours and honey is a perpetual comestible at vicarages. It offered not outward escape, as did books of travel, adventure, international intrigue, but inward – into a sort of museum of nostalgia."

"Dexter Holland - Vocals & Guitars"

"Noodles - Lead Guitars"

"Greg K. - Bassist"

"Ron Welty - Drums (retired in 2003)"

"Atom Willard - Drums (joined in 2003 after Ron Welty's departure)"

"Pete Parada - Drums (joined in 2007 after Willard's departure)"

"Don't know how it got this way, I don't know how long she's gonna stay. But every week it's the same, in her room and that's why I came."

"Pull the shades, razor blades. You're so tragic, hate you so, love you more, I'm so elastic. The things you say, the games you play."

"You gotta keep 'em separated"

"The more you suffer The more it shows you really care Right?"

"Drivers are rude Such attitudes But when I show my piece Complaints cease Something's odd Feel like I'm god You stupid dumbshit goddamned motherfucker!"

"Head over heels I've fit in before, Now I don't wanna do it no more, I wanna be who I wanna be, I guess it's hard for others to see"

"Me and my old lady sit and sip on wine. And when she says she loves me, well, I say that love is blind."

"It's cool to hate! I don't like nothing, and I like that fine."

"I just don't want to be controlled, that's all I want!"

"And it feels Yea it feels like Heaven's so far away And it stings Yea it stings now The world is so cold Now that you've gone away."

"Have you ever walked through a room/But it was more like the room passed around you"

"Have you ever felt like there was more/Like someone else was keeping score/And what could make you whole was simply out of reach"

"When the truth walks away, everybody stays/'Cause the truth about the world is that crime does pay"

"'Cause I'd like to think the world is a better place/I'd like to leave the world as a better place/I'd like to think the world..."

"Give it to me baby, uh-huh, uh-huh"

"And all the girlies say I'm pretty fly for a white guy"

"Everything he lacks, he makes up in denial"

"There's more to livin' than only survivin'/Maybe I'm not there, but I'm still tryin'…"

"Chances thrown/ Nothing's free/ Longing for what used to be/ Still it's hard/ Hard to see/ Fragile lives, shattered dreams"

"Where culture's defined by the ones least refined/And you'll be left behind if you don't fit in/It's all distorted in Americana my way/Well fuck you!"