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

by Alan Bradley

it now smelt as if a coffeehouse in the slums of Hell had been struck by lightning.

When it comes to chemistry, impatience is not a virtue.

Half an hour is far too long to engage in any activity, even one that’s enjoyable.

Rachmaninoff’s Eighteenth Variation on a Theme by Paganini, the best piece of music I could think of to accompany the recalling of a great love story.

The problem with bereavement, I had already decided, was learning when to put on and when to take off the various masks that one was required to wear:

It was a typical de Luce solution: logical beyond question, and yet, at the same time, mad as a March hare.

“All writers would have you believe that their stories are based on truth, but the word ‘fiction’ is formed from a word meaning ‘to contrive.’

A window, I realized, can exist almost unchanged itself while looking out upon the ever-changing ages.

“Catharsis cannot possibly come until the bitter end,”

Being married to a man who dressed himself in vestments was no holiday camp.

It had been my experience that strangers were not always truthful about their identity. Some seemed able to shrug it off as easily as a wet raincoat.

in one way or another, all fairy tales and myths are based on truth.”

But ‘kill,’ as you will have observed, like ‘spy’ and ‘stop,’ is really just one more of those short but exceedingly troublesome words.”

“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.