What Time the Sexton's Spade Doth Rust (Flavia de Luce, #11)

by Alan Bradley

The greatest minds in the world are often cranky when they first awaken in the morning, and mine is no exception. If I am to ascend above the ordinary, I require solitude the way a balloon needs helium.

Just beneath your feet the deceased are being devoured by fat black beetles, in a vast and grand banquet, while merry mushrooms digest the welcome leftovers of coffin wood. It is a world of harmony and dark contentment, a world of quiet grace and beauty. It is a happy dance of death.

Even the mildest irritation, sheltered, guarded, and fed, can grow into an immense and sometimes sudden rage. Dogger once remarked to me, apparently offhandedly, that rage is akin to compound interest,

It’s strange, isn’t it, how sadness is first detected by the nose? One would expect the eyes to lead the way, but it’s invariably the nose that triggers the earliest alarm. Sadness is much like smoke, I’ve decided: an odor raised at the very doorstep of the brain.

“Even Justice has its victims,” he said. “And they are sometimes more greatly wronged than even the victims of crime.”

“The making of a pot of tea is a blessing,” Father once told me in a rare moment of revealing his thoughts. “A blessing upon both the one who prepares it and those who drink it. A small sacrament, to be sure, but it must never be done frivolously or unthinkingly.”

I have often thought that all great detectives ought to have their office in a churchyard since the smell of the decaying dead is so much more stimulating than that of cigarettes and coffee.

I was working my way toward polonium, which was named in honor of Poland, the native country of the brilliant Marie Curie and her husband, Pierre, who discovered the stuff in 1898. Polonium is a quarter of a million times more poisonous than cyanide, and ought to be studied at a distance, although I keep a small sample of the stuff in a lead-lined box as a sentimental relic. Madame Curie had sent it to Uncle Tar as a memento of their rich correspondence, and in the end outlived him by several years. It looked like nothing so much as a slab of seaside toffee.

Time stolen from children can never be repaid. That is the true bitterness.

Sometimes I wished I had two skulls and two brains, so that I could think two things at once. As far as I can see, this is the greatest shortcoming in our human design.

If you wish to be noted for truthfulness, you must always tell the truth—but not all of it. I remembered Daffy reading aloud to me a quote by Mark Twain: Truth is the most precious thing we have. Economize it.