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The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1) QUOTES

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1) QUOTES

1 " Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

2 " What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

3 " I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

4 " I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

5 " As Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

6 " The first thing they would do would be to open my mouth and extract the soggy ball of my handkerchief, and as they spread it out flat on the table beside my white remains, an orange stamp—a stamp belonging to the King—would flutter to the floor: It was like something right out of Agatha Christie. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

7 " ...silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

8 " I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

9 " Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

10 " It was a lie and I detected it at once. As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

11 " Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet's seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, 'Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook? "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

12 " Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry! "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

13 " If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

14 " As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

No ... eight days a week. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

15 " I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended legs, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face ... "Vale."

The thrill of it all!

Yes," I said, "it was devastating. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

16 " Tell them we may not be praying with them," Father told the Vicar, "but we are at least not actively praying against them. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

17 " Simple pleasures are best. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

18 " I was me, I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

19 " Now, glancing over...as she knelt with her eyes closed, her fingertips touching and pointed to Heaven, and her lips shaping soft words of devotion, I had to pinch myself to keep in mind that I was sitting next to the Devil's Hairball. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)

20 " Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out. "

― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)