“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”