Marlene Wankum

“O how beautiful, look at the crimson snow! And up there on the rocks there are ever so many roses!”
― Johanna Spyri, Heidi

“Miranda's reward to herself, after a chief investigator dubbed her "the Eloise of four-year-old detectives," was to stretch her age.  She’d now taken to informing people that she was four- and-a-half-and-three-quarters. She didn't seem to grasp the concept of almost-five.”
― Theasa Tuohy, Mademoiselle le Sleuth

“I want to drink hard liquor, as you call it, before lunch. I've got a mouth like the bottom of the parrot's cage. You wouldn't want me to throw a screaming fit in front of all your officers.”
― Nevil Shute, On the Beach

“Colonel Aubertin and his two colleagues sat on a park bench in the private garden of Dorset Square. Rougemont sat between his two superiors, pleased that for once the commandant appeared to have had an abstemious lunch. “Major Vane-Stewart was telling me the other day that this was once the site of the first important cricket ground in London, established by the same Thomas Lord who later built the famous ground that bears his name, a few miles to the north of us in St. John’s Wood. There is a plaque recording this fact in that shed over there. In the middle of the square.”
“Cricket.” Angers spat out the words with disgust. “A stupid game played by idiots. Only the English could invent such a boring name.”
― Mark Ellis, The French Spy