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

by Alan Bradley

I knew instantly, too, that Father had just told a lie, and suddenly, without warning, somewhere inside me, a little thread broke. It felt as if I had just aged a little and something old had snapped.

Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he’s smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds.

“Tell them we may not be praying with them,” Father told the Vicar, “but we are at least not actively praying against them.”

Grandfather from Aberdeen, left in disgust after Culloden—must have had second thoughts, though, when he realized he’d done no more than trade the firths for the fjords.

You see, Flavia, silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.

Charles Darwin had once pointed out that the fiercest competition for survival came from one’s own tribe, and as the fifth of six children—and with three older sisters—he was obviously in a position to know what he was talking about.

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

I had long ago discovered that the best way to obtain answers about anything was to walk up to the closest person and ask. Inquire without.

There was no guillotine in Bishop’s Lacey, but neither were there any miracles.

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.

It was obvious that a philatelic crime needed to be pinned on a philatelist. If Father was unlikely to come to the scene of the crime, the scene of the crime would have to come to Father.

It is a simple fact of nature that while most men can walk right past a weeping woman as if their eyes are blinkered and their ears stopped up with sand, no female can ever hear the sound of another in distress without rushing instantly to her aid.