The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

by Alan Bradley

Ophelia was not, as I was, a long-range planner who believed in letting the soup of revenge simmer to perfection.

“It’s not only condescending, it fails to take into account the future,” she said.

I saw that the silver light of dawn had transformed the garden into a magic glade, its shadows darkened by the thin band of day beyond the walls. Sparkling dew lay upon everything, and I should not have been at all surprised if a unicorn had stepped from behind a rosebush and tried to put its head in my lap.

good-bye; adieu. It was pronounced val-eh, and was the second person singular imperative of the Latin verb valere, to be well.

Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

“By whom?” I asked, getting a grip on myself, even managing to get the grammar right.

A long hallway, hung profusely with dark, water-stained sporting prints, served as a lobby, in which centuries of sacrificed kippers had left the smell of their smoky souls clinging to the wallpaper.

which was a horse of an entirely different hue.

It was one of those stupid things men say simply to get in the last word.

when she is playing one of those early things by Beethoven that sounds as if it’s been cribbed from Mozart, I will stop at the drop of a hat, whatever I may be doing, to stroll casually through the drawing room.

Now, glancing over at Feely as she knelt with her eyes closed, her fingertips touching and pointed to Heaven, and her lips shaping soft words of devotion, I had to pinch myself to keep in mind that I was sitting next to the Devil’s Hairball.

“There are things which need to be known. And there are other things which need not to be known.”

I had my own opinion about the true meaning of this obviously alchemical reference, but, since I was saving it for my Ph.D. thesis, I kept it to myself.

Jonah’s skin had been made brown with salts of ferric iron (which, interestingly enough—to me at least—is also the antidote for arsenical poisoning).

Mary Magdalene, in a red dress (also iron, or perhaps grated particles of gold), holds out to him a purple garment (manganese dioxide) and a loaf of yellow bread (silver chloride).

THE REAL QUESTION WAS THIS: Who put the poison in the pie? And, even more to the point, if the dead man had eaten the thing by accident, whom had it originally been intended for?

I felt my inner cauldron beginning to boil: that bubbling pot of occult brew that could so quickly transform Flavia the Invisible into Flavia the Holy Terror.

silence can sometimes do more damage than words.

My life was becoming a long corridor of locked doors.

“Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring.

Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes—or

I made a mental note to find out if color can cause nausea.