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 reduced in less than a camera flash to carbon. Didn't Genesis say as much?...
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 tak...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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?
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.
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.
