Home > Work > As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce, #7)
1 " The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is. "
― Alan Bradley , As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust (Flavia de Luce, #7)
2 " One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. "
3 " How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture?Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through.I came to the conclusion, at last, that it was like this: Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony. "
4 " Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad. "
5 " There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same.There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been. "
6 " The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep. "
7 " One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece. "
8 " ...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets. "
9 " Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she's got. "
10 " Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure. "
11 " No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me.Life among the dead.This was where I was meant to be!What a revelation! And what a place to have it!I could succeed at whatever I chose. I could, for instance, become an undertaker. Or a pathologist. A detective, a gravedigger, a tombstone maker, or even the world's greatest murderer.Suddenly the world was my oyster—even if it was a dead one. "
12 " The more I dealt with adults, the less I wanted to be one. "
13 " There is genuine joy in being alone in the dark inside your own head with no outside distractions, where you can scramble from ledge to rocky ledge, hallooing happily in a vast, echoing cave; climbing hand over hand from ledge to ledge of facts and memories, picking up old gems and new: examining, comparing, putting them down again and reaching for the next. "
14 " Everyone else in the world is sorry. Dare to be something more than that. "
15 " Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It’s because they’re in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round. "
16 " Dogger had once warned me to be wary of any man who introduced himself as 'Mr.' It was an honorific, he said, a mark of respect to be bestowed by others, but never, ever, under any circumstances, upon oneself. "
17 " A pillar of strength, Daffy had once remarked, was a nice way of saying someone was terminally bossy, "
18 " It is always better, and far more rewarding, I have observed, to have someone else feel sorry for you, than to do the job yourself. "
19 " There’s something in human nature, I’m beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It’s like looking—or talking—through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken. "
20 " I must be honest about the fact that I'm made extremely uneasy by excessive noise, and that I do not care for shouted instructions. If I'd been meant to be a sheep, I reasoned, I'd have been born with wool instead of skin. "
