Home > Work > The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)
21 " Kun nyt katselin silmänsä ummistanutta, polvistunutta Feelyä, jonka taivaaseen suunnatut sormenpäät koskettivat toisiaan, muodostamassa huulillaan hartaita, suloisia sanoja, minun täytyi muistuttaa itseäni siitä, että vieressäni oli paholaisen yökkäämä karvapallo. "
― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)
22 " It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it. "
23 " I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself... "
24 " I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me:"If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!"Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Casanovas were located.I'd have to think of something else. "
25 " I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them.'How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows. "
26 " Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky. "
27 " Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie? "
28 " If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide. "
29 " Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue. "
30 " If you’re insinuating that my personal hygiene is not up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes. "
31 " I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn’t. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life "
32 " Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life. "
33 " The woman was putting her purse in the drawer and settling down behind the desk, and I realized I had never seen her before in my life. Her face was as wrinkled as one of those forgotten apples you sometimes find in the pocket of last year's winter jacket.Yes?" she said, peering over her spectacles. They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science. "
34 " As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes--or so the Vicar had remarked to Father... "
35 " I reached out and touched his hands and they stilled at once. I had observed—although I did not often make use of the fact—that there were times when a touch could say things that words could not. "
36 " Then I remembered that silence can sometimes do more damage than words. "
37 " A peculiar feeling passed over me--or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain. "
38 " My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary. "
39 " You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish. "
40 " There was no way out; not, at least, in this direction. I was like a hamster that had climbed to the top of the ladder in its cage and found there was nowhere to go but down. But surely hamsters knew in their hamster hearts that escape was futile; it was only we humans who were incapable of accepting our own helplessness. "