"That's where cats have the advantage...

over human beings," said Mr. Baldock. "When they want to get away from people they can climb a tree. The nearest we can get to that is to shut ourselves in the lavatory." ~ Agatha Christie, The Burden

"'Well, I've got it here somewhere.'...

Mrs. Lawton looked round herself with the vague expression of the habitually untidy." ~ Agatha Christie, The Clocks

"It was a small dingy bookshop...

in a side street not far from the British Museum. It had the usual trays of books outside..... I sidled through the doorway. It was necessary to sidle, since precariously arranged books impinged more and more every day on the passageway from the street. Inside, it was clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down. The distance between bookshelves was so narrow that you could only get along with great difficulty. There were piles of books perched on every shelf or table. On a stool in a corner, hemmed in by books, was an old man in a pork-pie hat with a large flat face like a stuffed fish. He had the air of one who has given up an unequal struggle. He had attempted to master the books, but the books had obviously succeeded in mastering him. He was a kind of King Canute of the book world, retreating before the advancing book tide. If he ordered it to retreat, it would have been with the sure and hopeless certainty that it would not do so. This was Mr. Solomon, proprietor of the shop." ~ Agatha Christie, The Clocks

"The orange cat...

was still sitting on the gatepost of Diana Lodge next door. He was no longer washing his face but was sitting up very straight, lashing his tail slightly, and gazing over the heads of the crowd with that complete disdain for the human race that is the special prerogative of cats and camels." ~ Agatha Christie, The Clocks

"Curiosity...

""

...such an interesting thing. To think what we owe to it throughout history. Curiosity. I don't know who invented curiosity. It is said to be usually associated with the cat. Curiosity killed the cat. But I should say really that the Greeks were the inventors of curiosity. They wanted to know. Before them, as far as I can see, nobody wanted to know much. They just wanted to know what the rules of the country they were living in were, and how they could avoid having their heads cut off or being impaled on spikes or something disagreeable happening to them. But they either obeyed or disobeyed. They didn't want to know why. But since then a lot of people have wanted to know why and all sorts of things have happened because of that. Boats, trains, flying machines and atom bombs  and penicillin and cures for various illnesses. A little boy watches his mother's kettle raising its lid because of the steam. And the next thing we know is we have railway trains, leading on in due course to railway strikes and all that. And  so on and so on." ~ Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie's Elephants Can Remember

When Everything Seems Hopeless