“You must have loved her awfully," I said, realizing even as I spoke that I made it sound as if Fenella were already dead. "Yes, sometimes very much," Porcelain said reflectively, "-and sometimes not at all." She must have seen my startled reaction. "Love's not some big river that flows on and on forever, and if you believe it is, you're a bloody fool. It can be dammed up until nothing's left but a trickle..." "Or stopped completely, I added.”

“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.”

“The woman was putting her purse in the drawer and settling down behind the desk, and I realized I had never seen her before in my life. Her face was as wrinkled as one of those forgotten apples you sometimes find in the pocket of last year's winter jacket.Yes?" she said, peering over her spectacles. They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science.”

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

“...and I realized not without a sinking feeling that he was already completely in Feely’s thrall, hanging on her every word like ball on a rubber string, nodding like a demented woodpecker, and grinning like a fool.”

“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.”

“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?”