Alan Bradley

“It was quite wrong of me Had I heard what I thought I’d heard or were my ears playing hob with me It was more likely that the sun and the moon should suddenly dance a jolly jig in the heavens than that one of my sisters should apologize. It was simply unheard of.”

“I waved my hand like a frantic dust mop fingers spread ludicrously wide apart as if to say “What jolly fun ” What I wanted to do actually was to leap to my feet strike a pose and burst into one of those “Yo-ho for the open road ” songs they always play in the cinema musicals but I stifled the urge and settled for a ghastly grin and an extra twiddle of the fingers.”

“Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.”

“I must warn you at the outset that I'm not at my best conversing with little girls," he announced.I bit my lip and kept my mouth shut. "A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don't you think?”

“Why then had I heard nothing? Everyone knows that the killing of a human being requires the exertion of a certain amount of mechanical energy. I forget the exact formula, although I know there is one.”

“I was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang. "Dash it all!" I said. There was nothing I hated more than being interrupted when I was about to do something gratifying with chemicals.”

“Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.”

“I remembered that Beethoven's symphonies had sometimes been given names... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.”

“And it was signed simply “George.”

“being Flavia de Luce was like being a sublimate: like the black crystal residue that is left on the cold glass of a test tube by the violet fumes of iodine.”

“The panel on the right portrayed Jesus emerging from his tomb, as Mary Magdalene, in a red dress (also iron, or perhaps grated particles of gold), holds out to him a purple garment (manganese dioxide) and a loaf of yellow bread (silver chloride).”

“Once, when I remarked that she looked like a disoriented bandicoot, she leapt up from the piano bench and beat me within an inch of my life with a rolled-up piano sonata by Schubert. Ophelia has no sense of humor.”

“The exchange of a wife for a pair of gates( “The finest this side Paradise,”) Brandwyn had written in his diary”

“Translation: She was perishing with nosiness.”

“And Miss Ophelia?" he asked, getting round to her at last. "Miss Ophelia? Well, to tell you the truth, Ned, we're all rather worried about her." Ned recoiled as if a wasp had gone up his nose. "Oh? What's the trouble? Nothing serious, I hope." "She's gone all green," I said. "I think it's chlorosis. Dr. Darby thinks so too.”

“Was the pie good, luv?" she asked. I'd forgotten the pie until that moment. I took a leaf from Dr. Darby's notebook. "Um," I said.”

“AND THE PERSON OUTSIDE TO WHOM YOU WERE speaking?” Inspector Hewitt asked. "Dogger," I said. "First name?" "Flavia," I said. I couldn't help myself.”

“I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell “So utterly Pavlovian,” Feely said”

“I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.”

“Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes.”

“Vaporized by the sun! Wasn't that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much? For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. This was far more than dull old theology: It was precise scientific observation! Carbon was the Great Leveler--the Grim Reaper.Diamonds were nothing more than carbon, but carbon in a crystal lattice that made it the hardest known mineral in nature. That was the way we all were headed. I was sure of it. We were destined to be diamonds!”

“They seem nice, though, your sisters, really,' Porcelain remarked.'Ha!' I said. 'Shows what little you know! I hate them!''Hate them? I should have thought you'd love them.''Of course I love them,' I said.... 'That's why I'm so good at hating them.”

“Death by family silver, I thought, before I could turn off that part of my mind.”

“Either way, the whole thing was a pain in the porpoise.”

“Cheese!" I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.”

“But what he said was true enough: I had recently destroyed a perfectly good set of wire braces by straightening them to pick a lock. Father had grumbled, of course, but had made another appointment to have me netted and dragged back up to London, to that third-floor ironmonger's shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.”

“Mother Goose!I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I don't give a frog's fundament for them when they come from an adult.”

“You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish.”

“I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.”

“What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.”

“Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it "woman's intuition.”

“Horehound sticks are meant to be shared with friends, don't you think?' She was dead wrong about that: Horehound sticks were meant to be gobbled down in solitary gluttony, and preferably in a locked room, but I didn't dare say so.”

“As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes--or so the Vicar had remarked to Father...”

“Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.”

“I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them.'How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.”

“Had I been too cruel to that horror, Miss Mountjoy? Too vindictive? Wasn't she, after all, just a harmless and lonely old spinster? Would a Larry de Luce have been more understanding? 'Hell, no!' I shouted into the wind...”

“If you need me, I shall be weeping at the bottom of my wardrobe.”

“Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue.”

“I reached out and touched his hands and they stilled at once. I had observed—although I did not often make use of the fact—that there were times when a touch could say things that words could not.”

“I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.”

“There's a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, don't we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?”

“How very kind of her, ' I said. 'I must remember to send her a card.'I'd send her a card alright. It would be the Ace of Spades, and I'd mail it anonymously from somewhere other than Bishop's Lacey.”

“It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her...Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me.”

“I wanted to shake the stuffing out of him; I wanted to hug him; I wanted to die.”

“Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?”

“You see, Flavia, silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.”

“Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life.”

“Like most, I was a solitary boy at first, keeping to my books and weeping in the hedgerows whenever I could get away on my own. Surely, I thought, I must be the saddest child in the world; that there must be something innately horrid about me to cause my father to cast me off so heartlessly. I believed that if I could discover what it was, there might be a chance of putting things right, of somehow making it up to him.”

“If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.”

“I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life”