Vaporized by the sun! Wasn’t that what the universe had in store for all of us? There would come a day when the sun exploded like a red balloon, and everyone on earth would be...

I remembered Father remarking once that if rudeness was not attributable to ignorance it could be taken as a sure sign that one was speaking to a member of the aristocracy.

Yaroo!” I shouted, and I didn’t give a beetle’s bottom who heard me. “Ya-rooo!

…I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.

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...

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...

Public practice of any art and staring in men’s faces is very indelicate in a female,” he had said. Well I’d seen Dr. Johnson’s face in the book’s frontispiece and I couldn’t imagine anyone male...

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,...

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...

…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.

There had fallen between us what Dogger once referred to as “a companionable silence,” a little parcel of time during which neither of us felt any particular need to talk.

I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table. As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond something at the...

Cheese!” I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.

I’m at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.

Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver,” she had once said. “Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.

There’s a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, don’t we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?

Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.

The press was ruthless, but then so was the church.Flavia de Luce

I remembered that Beethoven’s symphonies had sometimes been given names… they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.

I felt a pang — a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I’d first glimpsed it, I longed to be...

Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, you’re numb, yet on the other, something inside is trying desperately to claw its way back to normal: to...

How curious it was, […], that we humans had taken millions of year to crawl up out of the swamps and yet, within minutes of death, we were already tobogganing back down the slope.

Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure.

I wanted to throw my arms around this dotty old bat in her George Bernard Shaw costume and hug her until her juices ran out.

As my turn approached, I suddenly became aware of my own heartbeat. I wished that I were a Tibetan lama, so that I could control its racing valves.

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

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...

Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.

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...

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

Do What?’ ‘Lie,’ he said. ‘Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?”Well,’ I wanted to say, ‘there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are...

The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.

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:...

Not to be too dramatic about it, that night I slept the sleep of the damned. I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor...

I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing death.

I see ” the Inspector said and left it at that. Later I would have a quick piddle behind the caravan for insurance purposes. No one would be any the wiser.

While you’ve been gadding about the countryside, we’ve held a meeting, and we’ve all of us decided that you must go.’In short, we’ve voted you out of the family,’ Daffy said. ‘It was unanimous.

A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.

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

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one’s self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the...

How very kind of her, ‘ I said. ‘I must remember to send her a card.’I’d send her a card alright. It would be the Ace of Spades, and I’d mail it anonymously from somewhere...

They seem nice, though, your sisters, really,’ Porcelain remarked.’Ha!’ I said. ‘Shows what little you know! I hate them!”Hate them? I should have thought you’d love them.”Of course I love them,’ I said…. ‘That’s why...

I had found by experience that putting things down on paper helped to clear the mind in precisely the same way, as Mrs. Mullet had taught me, that an eggshell clarifies the consommé or the...

…silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.

I have no fear of the dead. Indeed in my own limited experience I have found them to produce in me a feeling that is quite the opposite of fear. A dead body is much...

Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.

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.

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.

When you’re that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me– that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly...