Quotes:
Tendrils of raw fog floated up from the ice like agonized spirits departing their bodies.
Johann Rudolf Glauber,
Why, just yesterday I had a thimbleful of arsenic in my hand, and I put it down somewhere. I can’t for the life of me think what I could have done with it.” “I found it in the butter dish,” Dogger said. “I took the liberty of setting it out for the mice in the coach house.” “Butter and all?” I asked. “Butter and all.” “But not the dish.” “But not the dish,” said Dogger. Why aren’t there more people like Dogger in the world?
“Why do you do it, Flavia?” the Inspector asked in a suddenly different voice, his eyes on the mess I had made of the carpet. I don’t think I had ever seen him look so pained. “Do what?” I couldn’t help myself. “Lie,” he said. “Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?” I had often thought about this myself, and although I had a ready answer, I did not feel obliged to give it to him. “Well,” I wanted to say, “there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city walls.” I didn’t say that, of course. What I did say was: “I don’t know.”
It’s wonderful how the mind works in such situations. I remember distinctly that my first thought was “Here’s Flavia, her hands full of fire in a cupboard jam-packed with combustibles.”
‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news,’ or so, at least, said the apostle Paul, quoting Isaiah, but presumably speaking of his own feet, in his letter to the Romans,” the vicar remarked to no one in particular.
No comments:
Post a Comment