The Weed that Strings the Hangman's Bag

p 112: "'You are unreliable, Flavia,' he said. 'Utterly unreliable.'

Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.

Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We're past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like 'boof-boof'--just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we're still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we're invisible--except when we choose not to be."

p 282: "'What did Flaubert mean,' I asked at last, 'when he said that Madame Bovary gave herself up to Rodolphe?'

'He meant,' Dogger said, 'that they became the greatest of friends. The very greatest of friends.'

'Ah!' I said. 'Just as I thought.'"

p 308: "Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.

But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it 'woman's intuition.'"