Home > Work > The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)
41 " Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes. "
― Alan Bradley , The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Flavia de Luce, #1)
42 " Once, when I remarked that she looked like a disoriented bandicoot, she leapt up from the piano bench and beat me within an inch of my life with a rolled-up piano sonata by Schubert. Ophelia has no sense of humor. "
43 " I detected instantly that she didn’t like me. It’s a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her. Feely says that there is a broken telephone connection between men and women, and we can never know which of us rang off. With a boy you never know whether he’s smitten or gagging, but with a girl you can tell in the first three seconds. Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signalling that Mary detesting me. "
44 " AND THE PERSON OUTSIDE TO WHOM YOU WERE speaking?” Inspector Hewitt asked. "Dogger," I said. "First name?" "Flavia," I said. I couldn't help myself. "
45 " Wrapped up in the music, I threw myself into an overstuffed chair and let my legs dangle over the arm, the position in which Nature intended music to be listened to, and for the first time in days I felt the muscles in my neck relaxing. "
46 " Even in complete silence, Buckshaw had its own unique silence; a silence I would recognize anywhere. "
47 " it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. "
48 " I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell “So utterly Pavlovian,” Feely said "
49 " Translation: She was perishing with nosiness. "
50 " You see, Flavia, silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities. "
51 " ...Раят трябва да е място, на което библиотеката е отворена двайсет и четири часа в денонощието, седем дни в седмицата.Не... осем дни в седмицата. "
52 " I hoisted the lid off the Spode vegetable dish and, from the depths of its hand-painted butterflies and raspberries, spooned out a generous helping of peas. Using my knife as a ruler and my fork as a prod, I marshaled the peas so that they formed meticulous rows and columns across my plate: rank upon rank of little green spheres, spaced with a precision that would have delighted the heart of the most exacting Swiss watchmaker. Then, beginning at the bottom left, I speared the first pea with my fork and ate it. "
53 " Had I been too cruel to that horror, Miss Mountjoy? Too vindictive? Wasn't she, after all, just a harmless and lonely old spinster? Would a Larry de Luce have been more understanding? 'Hell, no!' I shouted into the wind... "
54 " 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. "
55 " I had to suppress a smile. Sherlock Holmes once remarked of his brother, Mycroft, that you were as unlikely to find him outside of the Diogenes Club as you were to meet a tramcar coming down a country lane. Like Mycroft, Father had his rails, and he ran on them. Except for church and the occasional short-tempered dash to the train to attend a stamp show, Father seldom, if ever, stuck his nose out-of-doors. "
56 " I wanted to shake the stuffing out of him; I wanted to hug him; I wanted to die. "
57 " What else?"Nothing," Dogger said. "Just sign it. "Kings prefer brevity. "
58 " Why then had I heard nothing? Everyone knows that the killing of a human being requires the exertion of a certain amount of mechanical energy. I forget the exact formula, although I know there is one. "
59 " People love to talk--especially when the talking involves answering the questions of others--because it makes them feel wanted. [...] I had long ago discovered that the best way to obtain answers about anything was to walk up to the closest person and ask. "
60 " So that was it. As at a birth, so at a death. Without so much as a kiss-me-quick-and-mind-the-marmalade, the only female in sight is enlisted to trot off and see that the water is boiled. Rustle something up, indeed! What did he take me for, some kind of cowboy? "