Home > Work > Haunting Violet (Haunting Violet, #1)
1 " Tucking my nose into a book makes me completely oblivious to my surroundings. I would have made a terrible spy in the army--the first person to hand me a novel would have been able to shoot my head clean off without me noticing. "
― Alyxandra Harvey , Haunting Violet (Haunting Violet, #1)
2 " I was secretly entranced with the idea of a lady novelist. I should dearly love to be one. Or maybe a goblin-fighting-pirate-queen. It was difficult to choose sometimes. "
3 " Perhaps I won't marry then. Instead, you and I shall live as spinsters in a cottage by the sea. We'll burn our corsets, eat chocolate morning, noon and night and grow fat as hedgehogs. "
4 " I tried not to look as if I was hiding a handsome young lad under the mattress. "
5 " Mother was delicate the way badgers were delicate. "
6 " It wasn't my most fashionable dress, but anyone who called for me at nine o-clock in the bloody morning would have to take what he was given. "
7 " Could one write a strongly worded letter to the deceased requiring their full cooperation? "
8 " You get into trouble the way debutantes get into ball gowns. "
9 " We were so close to home now, I would have tripped an old woman with a cane if she'd stood in the way of the first available chair. "
10 " I'd seen elevated social mamas do far worse in the name of securing a husband for their daughters. An eldery, gray-curled grandmother once tripped an eligible bachelor on his way to the gaming table so he would fall at her granddaughter's satin-slippered feet. Instead he'd landed on a footman and broken his arm. "
11 " I could think of a hundred things I'd rather do than follow a possible murderess and the ghost of her victim. "
12 " Finally, my mother's training will be put to good use. Never mind finding an eligible bachelor, I mean to find a murderer. "
13 " We'd been waltzing and eating tea cakes with a murderer. "
14 " I can't breathe. I'm joing the Rational Dress Society the very moment we are back in London,and I fully intend to leave their pamphlets under Mother's pillow and tucked into her corsets. "
15 " The sky was as blue and delicate as a porcelain teacup, and the hills rolled gently in all directions, intersected occasionally with the silver ribbon of a river. "
16 " I was usually hungry enough to eat what I was given without comment, but if the Earl served boiled tongue or calves' foot jelly, I fully intended to wrap it in my napkin and hide it in the nearest umbrella stand. "
17 " And in her underthings, no less!" Murder was less scandalous than my corset and pantalettes. She sniffed. "Like mother, like daughter. "
18 " I turned my attention back to the tal, handsome footman who was waiting patiently for me to take his hand and descend out of the plush carriage. Colin looked at me blandly. I knew perfectly well that he was remembering last spring when I stumbled out of a hired hack and sprawled, rather spectacularly, into a muddy puddle. "
19 " violet doesn't believe in ghosts...but they believe in her. "
20 " If I'd been ten years old again I'd have stuck my tongue out at Caroline. At sixteen, I ought to be above such behavior.I wasn't. "