Great series of books. Flavia de Luce is a rich character and the perfect unreliable narrator.
Quotes:
I skipped down the broad stone staircase into the hall, pausing at the door of the dining room just long enough to toss my pigtails back over my shoulders and into their regulation position.
Odd, isn’t it, that a charge of lipstick is precisely the size of a .45 caliber slug.
Whenever she was thinking about Ned, Feely played Schumann. I suppose that’s why they call it romantic music.
Because she plays so beautifully, I have always felt it my bounden duty to be particularly rotten to her.
If there was anything that surprised me about this tale, it was the way in which Father brought it to life. I could almost reach out and touch the gentlemen in their high starched collars and stovepipe hats; the ladies in their bustled skirts and bonnets. And as the characters in his tale came to life, so did Father.
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, who had told Feely, who had told Daffy, who had told me.
Something in me that was less than noble rose up out of the depths, and I was transformed in the blink of an eye into Flavia the Pigtailed Avenger, whose assignment was to throw a wrench into this fearsome and unstoppable pie machine.
The first thing that struck me was the smell of the place: a mixture of cabbage, rubber cushions, dishwater, and death.
“Hello, Flavia,” he said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
What would Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier have done? I wondered. Would she have stood here fuming and foaming like one of those miniature volcanoes which results when a heap of ammonium dichromate is ignited? Somehow I doubted it. Marie-Anne would forget the chemistry and tackle the door.
As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.
It has been my experience that facetiousness in the mouth of someone old enough to know better is often no more than camouflage for something far, far worse.
I saw the faraway look come into her eyes: the look of an adult floundering desperately to find common ground with someone younger.
They had what they call an ink-quest at the library—it’s the same thing as a poet’s mortem,
Jack’s carved wooden face was a face we all recognized: It was as if Rupert had deliberately modeled the puppet’s head from a photograph of Robin, the Inglebys’ dead son. The likeness was uncanny.
Last night’s excitement had drained everyone of their energy and they were, I guessed, still snoring away in their respective rooms like a pack of convalescent vampires.
Sometimes I hated myself. But not for long.
Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth.
“You lie when you are attacked for nothing … for the color of your eyes.” “Yes,” I said. “I suppose I do.” I had never really thought of it in this way. “So,” she said, suddenly animated, as if the encounter with Mrs. Bull had warmed her blood, “you lie like us. You lie like a Gypsy.” “Is that good?” I asked. “Or bad?” Her answer was slow in coming. “It means you will live a long life.”
steadily losing ground to the more exciting religious sects such as the Ranters, the Shakers, the Quakers, the Diggers, the Levellers, the Sliders, the Swadlers, the Tumblers, the Dunkers, the Tunkers, and yes, even the Incorrupticolians,
I’d learned quite early in life that the mind loves nothing better than to spook itself with outlandish stories, as if the various coils of the brain were no more than a troop of roly-poly Girl Guides huddled over a campfire in the darkness of the skull.
Death by family silver, I thought, before I could turn off that part of my mind.
Although it sounded like a dry chuckle, the sound I heard must really have been a little cry of dismay from the Inspector at having so foolishly lost the services of a first-rate mind.
I swore it on my mother’s grave. Harriet, of course, had no grave. Her body was somewhere in the snows of Tibet.
When I come to write my autobiography, I must remember to record the fact that a chicken-wire fence can be scaled by a girl in bare feet, but only by one who is willing to suffer the tortures of the damned to satisfy her curiosity.
By necessity, I had become quite an accomplished laboratory chef.
With a bit of patience and a Bunsen burner, some truly foul odors can be generated in the laboratory.
I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the nursery rhyme riddle is the most basic form of the detective story. It’s a mystery stripped of all but the essential facts.
A “dear” or “dearie” to me is about as welcome as a bullet to the brain. I’ve had places reserved in the ha’penny seats of Hell for people who address me in this way.
I think there must be a kind of courage that comes from not being able to make up your mind.
“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.”
Thinking and prayer are much the same thing anyway, when you stop to think about it—if that makes any sense. Prayer goes up and thought comes down—or so it seems. As far as I can tell, that’s the only difference. I thought about this as I walked across the fields to Buckshaw. Thinking about Brookie Harewood—and who killed him, and why—was really just another way of praying for his soul, wasn’t it? If this was true, I had just established a direct link between Christian charity and criminal investigation. I could hardly wait to tell the vicar!
Until now, my fury had always been like those jolly Caribbean carnivals we had seen in the cinema travelogues—a noisy explosion of color and heat that wilted steadily as the day went on. But now it had suddenly become an icy coldness: a frigid wasteland in which I stood unapproachable. And it was in that instant, I think, that I began to understand my father.
“Of course I love them,” I said, throwing myself full length onto the bed. “That’s why I’m so good at hating them.”
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