The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches (Flavia de Luce, #6)

by Alan Bradley

“Please. It’s vitally important.” Vitally? Anyone who used the word “vitally” in everyday conversation could hardly be a villain. “Well …” I said, wavering. “Tell your father that the Gamekeeper is in jeopardy. He’ll understand. I must speak to him. Tell him that the Nide is under—”

It’s things like this that really shake me: sudden terrifying glimpses into the world of being an adult, and they are sometimes things that I am not sure I really want to know.

We might as well face it: Death is a bore. It is even harder on the survivors than on the deceased, who at least don’t have to worry about when to sit and when to stand, or when to permit a pale smile and when to glance tragically away.

One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.

Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you’re numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to pull a funny face, to leap out like a jack-in-the-box, to say “Smile, damn you, smile!”

the work of Takaki Kanehiro, a Japanese naval surgeon whose work led to the discovery—by Eijkman, Hopkins, and others—that a solid diet of white rice produced in the body a nerve poison whose antidote, oddly enough, was the very husk which had been removed in preparing the rice for consumption!

This antidote, which was at first called aneurin because of what its absence did to the nerves, turned out to be thiamine, which was later given the designation vitamin B1.

Dr. Darby held up a hand, its palm towards me. “The poet Cowper,” he said, “who knew whereof he spoke, once wrote, ‘God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform.’ We mere mortals must never question what we sometimes take to be the blind workings of Fate.”

There was so much to be grateful for, when you stopped to think of it, in spite of all our hardships.

There is a strange strength in secrets which can never be achieved by spilling one’s guts.

In a strange way, being an aviator was like being a departed soul: You could look down upon the Earth without actually being present, see all without being seen. It was easy enough to see why God, having called the dry land “Earth” and the gathering together of the waters “the Seas,” saw that it was good. I could picture the Old Fellow lifting up the horizon like the lid of a stewing pot and peeking in with one red eye to admire His Creation: to see how it was coming along. It was good!

“What are we going to do, Dogger?” It seemed a reasonable question. After all he had been through, surely Dogger knew something of hopeless situations. “We shall wait upon tomorrow,” he said. “But—what if tomorrow is worse than today?” “Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.” “And so forth?” I asked. “And so forth,” Dogger said. It was comforting to have an answer, even one I didn’t understand. I must have looked skeptical.

“I keep six honest serving-men They taught me all I knew; Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

“I don’t care” is the last bit of baggage to be tossed overboard in a losing argument,