An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

it is simplest to treat him with the same calm good humor one might employ when coaxing a stubborn horse or a slightly backwards child.

There are few things I despise more than people who constantly quote platitudes. It demonstrates a painful lack of originality.

It was astonishing, I mused, how often people claimed to be honest when they were simply making a virtue of excessive rudeness.

You have employment that suits you, a companion who clearly worships your very hem. You have health and beauty and a wit so sharp a man might cut himself and think the bleeding a privilege.”

It has been my experience that when one is accosted by a lowness of spirits due to some failing in one’s character, it becomes a habit to seek out and prod any other failing.

after the publication of Mr. Darwin’s text. When On the Origin of Species had first burst upon the scene, many misread its premise of a common ancestor shared by man and ape to mean that men were descended from monkeys—a perfectly ludicrous notion.

I am keenly aware of my own hypocrisies even as I indulge them—I

all of us must be useful if we cannot be independent.

There are few people on earth more capable of hatred than the female sex when caged.

“There is nothing more political than the ability to take care of one’s own people.”

“What is overlooked is often the most significant,