“If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.”

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

“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.”

“I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table. As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond something at the root of my tongue leapt like a little goat and my stomach turned over. There are not many things that I despise but chiefest among them is skin on milk. I loathe it with a passion. Not even the thought of the marvelous chemical change that forms the stuff—the milk’s proteins churned and ripped apart by the heat of boiling then reassembling themselves as they cool into a jellied skin—was enough to console me. I would rather eat a cobweb.”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”