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 face of the world.

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

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 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 more fascinating than a live one and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories. I’d had the good fortune of seeing several of them in my time.

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

But when oxidation nibbles more slowly - more delicately, like a tortoise - at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations.

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.

Books make the soul float.

Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you've been or what you've done.

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

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.

Mother Goose!I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I don't give a frog's fundament for them when they come from an adult.

But what he said was true enough: I had recently destroyed a perfectly good set of wire braces by straightening them to pick a lock. Father had grumbled, of course, but had made another appointment to have me netted and dragged back up to London, to that third-floor ironmonger's shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.

I do not encourage early morning chirpiness, even in those whom I know and love. It is generally a sign of a sloppy mind, and is not to be encouraged.

You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.

I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.

Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.

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

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.

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'm so good at hating them.

Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and you're left standing on your own.

As anybody with two older sisters can tell you, a closed door is like a red rag to a bull. It cannot go unchallenged.

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.

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.

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 pull a funny face, to leap out like a jack-in-the-box, to say "Smile, damn you, smile!

Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.

I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.

The vicar's organized a snow-shoveling party.""But why?" I asked.It didn't make sense. If all the roads were closed, what use was it clearing a way to the front door?"Because," said Aunt Felicity's voice behind me, "it is a well-known fact that more than two men shut up together in an enclosed space for more than an hour constitute a hazard to society. If unpleasantness is to be avoided, they must be made to go outdoors and work off their animal spirits.

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 of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tine aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.

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 ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.

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?

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

How could I tell Clarence that finding another dead body was anything but dreadful? On the contrary: it was thrilling; it was exciting; it was exhilarating, it was invigorating; to say nothing of electrifying and above all, satisfying.How could I tell the dear man that murder made me feel so gloriously alive?

It's amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one's spirits.

The first thing they would do would be to open my mouth and extract the soggy ball of my handkerchief, and as they spread it out flat on the table beside my white remains, an orange stamp—a stamp belonging to the King—would flutter to the floor: It was like something right out of Agatha Christie.

...silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.

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.

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

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 lost.

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

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

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.

Love is love, wherever you may find it—even when it's covered in feathers.

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 other than Bishop's Lacey.

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 coffee, which, of course, is a simple matter of chemistry. The albumin contained in the eggshell has the property of collecting and binding the rubbish that floats in the dark liquid, which can then be removed and discarded in a single reeking clot: a perfect description of the writing process.

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.

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

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

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.

I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they're caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.

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 transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.

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.

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 offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.

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

We always want to love the recipients of our charity," the doctor said, negotiating a sharp bend in the road with a surprising demonstration of steering skill, "but it is not necessary. Indeed, it is sometimes not possible.

Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is not so simple as it sounds. What it means, in fact, is being charitable--which, as the vicar is fond of pointing out, is the most difficult of the graces to master. Faith and hope are a piece of cake but charity is a Pandora's box: the monster in the cistern which, when the lid is opened, comes swarming out to seize you by the throat.

True charity, I had had discovered, consists of swallowing an invisible flaming sword.

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.

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 like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city of walls.'I didn't say that, of course. What I did say was: 'I don't know.

I want to know who I am before it is too late—before I am no longer the same person—before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are others when it seems to matter not a tinker's curse.