The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches
Alan Bradley
Top 10 Best Quotes
“One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.”
“What are we going to do, Dogger?' It seemed a reasonable question. After all he had been through, surely Dogger knew something of hopeless situations. 'We shall wait upon tomorrow,' he said. 'But--what if tomorrow is worse than today?' 'Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.' 'And so forth?' I asked. 'And so forth,' Dogger said.”
“If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.”
“We might as well face it: Death is a bore. It is even harder on the survivors than on the deceased, who at least don’t have to worry about when to sit and when to stand, or when to permit a pale smile and when to glance tragically away.”
“I suddenly realized that there's something about singing hymns with a large group of people that sharpens the senses remarkably. I stored this observation away for later use; it was a jolly good thing to know for anyone practicing the art of detection.”
“Feely had the knack of being able to screw one side of her face into a witchlike horror while keeping the other as sweet and demure as any maiden from Tennyson. It was perhaps, the one thing I envied her.”
“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!”
“Was he being what Daffy called “ironical”? She had once told me that the word meant the use of veiled sarcasm: the dagger under the silk. “The smiler with the knife!” she had hissed in a horrible voice.”
“One of the things I love about myself is my ability to remain open to suggestion.”
“…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.”
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Book Keywords:
singing, grief, hope, flavia-de-luce
