Clara

“Nutty people don't rat on you. Nice, friendly, ordinary next-door neighbor types--they would rat on you and think nothing of it.”
― John Bellairs, The Curse of the Blue Figurine

“Of course she did not like the police,” said Marcus. “Nobody likes the police. I do not like the police. But I have to stand well with them because of my hotel.”
― Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad

“Their mother, Lady Mary, had been born the youngest daughter of the Early of Elmsley but had defied the conventions of the ton by marrying a freedman of Senegalese birth whom she had met through her work with the abolition. And whereas in the enlightened twenty-first century the marriage of a British aristocrat to a Person of Colour is a wholly unremarkable thing that results in no hostility whatsoever, in the bad old days of the 1800s it caused quite the scandal.

Isn't it wonderful to know how far your species has come?”
― Alexis Hall, Confounding Oaths

“She was the exact image of the Wicked Fairy who had terrorised her childish dreams. To begin with, she was only four foot eight or nine. It was a child's stature but not a childish face. The cheeks were pendulous and the nose curved. The eyes were very keen and black. And black too was the elaborately dressed hair—coal black without a grey hair to soften it. It lay above the peering brow in elaborate folds and scallops, tight, neat, and extraordinarily artificial. She wore a curious black velvet garment pinned in front with an elaborate and apparently very valuable diamond brooch.”
― Patricia Wentworth, The Girl in the Cellar