If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the face of the world.
Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.
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.
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.
Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you’ve been or what you’ve done.
Cheese!” I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.
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.
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 do not encourage early morning chirpiness, even in those whom I know and love. It is generally a sign of a sloppy mind, and is not to be encouraged.
You can learn from a glance at anyone’s library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.
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.
The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.
While you’ve been gadding about the countryside, we’ve held a meeting, and we’ve all of us decided that you must go.’In short, we’ve voted you out of the family,’ Daffy said. ‘It was unanimous.
Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and you’re left standing on your own.
As anybody with two older sisters can tell you, a closed door is like a red rag to a bull. It cannot go unchallenged.
One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic.
I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.
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?
As Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera.
It’s amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one’s spirits.
…silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.
…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.
When you’re that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me– that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly lost.
The press was ruthless, but then so was the church.Flavia de Luce
I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation
I’m at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.
Love is love, wherever you may find it—even when it’s covered in feathers.
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.
The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep.
A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.
I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they’re caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.
Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.
…I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.
We always want to love the recipients of our charity,” the doctor said, negotiating a sharp bend in the road with a surprising demonstration of steering skill, “but it is not necessary. Indeed, it is sometimes not possible.
True charity, I had had discovered, consists of swallowing an invisible flaming sword.
Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she’s got.