The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No ... eight days a week.

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.

I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me: "If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!" Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Casanovas were located. I'd have to think of something else.

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.

I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself...

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

...silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.

Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.

Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie, Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?

Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue.

Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet's seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, 'Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?

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

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

If you’re insinuating that my personal hygiene is not up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes.

I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life

I was me, I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.

As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: 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...

Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life.

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 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.

Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!

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.

A peculiar feeling passed over me--or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain.

Then I remembered that silence can sometimes do more damage than words.

You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish.

Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out.

There was no way out; not, at least, in this direction. I was like a hamster that had climbed to the top of the ladder in its cage and found there was nowhere to go but down. But surely hamsters knew in their hamster hearts that escape was futile; it was only we humans who were incapable of accepting our own helplessness.