I Am Half-Sick of Shadows (Flavia de Luce, #4)

by Alan Bradley

I’d been spending so much time sitting halfway down the stairs that I was beginning to feel like Christopher Robin.

The vicar had no more than a polite interest in postage stamps and Father had no more than a passing interest in heaven, so the bond between them remained a puzzle.

Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.

That was the way with ghosts, though: They appeared at the strangest of times in the most peculiar places.

There were times when I felt as if I were standing astride a cold ocean—one foot in the New World and one foot in the Old. As they drifted relentlessly apart, I was in danger of being torn up the middle.

I had noticed on other occasions that overcrowding, even in a spacious place, makes one feel like a different person. Perhaps, I thought, whenever we began to breathe the breath of others, when the spinning atoms of their bodies began to mingle with our own, we took on something of their personality, like crystals in a snowflake. Perhaps we became something more, yet something lesser than ourselves.

“I believe a man named Aristotle once said that we delight to contemplate things such as dead bodies, which in themselves would give us pain, because in them, we experience a pleasure of learning which outweighs the pain.”