The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)

by Alan Bradley

Cynthia was a great organizer, but then, so were the men with whips who got the pyramids built.

Although he was a very great musician, and a wizard composer of symphonies, Beethoven was quite often a dismal failure when it came to ending them.

the birds that had lived in the tower in this century were more likely to be coddled by hand than in boiling water.

“He must be very proud of you.” “Yes,” I said, “he is. Very.” Actually, it was a thought that had never crossed my mind.

She had given the female password—spoken those magic words that stretched back through the mists of time to a bond made in some primordial swamp. I was in her power. I went instantly limp and nodded my head.

THERE’S SOMETHING ABOUT pottering with poisons that clarifies the mind. When the slightest slip of the hand could prove fatal, one’s attention is forced to focus like a burning-glass upon the experiment, and it is then that the answers to half-formed questions so often come swarming to mind as readily as bees coming home to the hive.

it has since become one of my favorite books, containing, as it does in its final chapters, what must be the finest and most exciting description of death by arsenic in all of literature.

The problem with we de Luces, I decided, is that we are infested with history in much the same way that other people are infested with lice.

How curious it was, I thought, that we humans had taken millions of years to crawl up out of the swamps and yet, within minutes of death, we were already tobogganing back down the slope.