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

by Alan Bradley

What intrigued me more than anything 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 real stability.

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

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