Alan Bradley Quotes

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.

~ Alan Bradley

Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

I have no fear of the dead. Indeed in my own limited experience I have found them to produce in me a feeling that is quite the opposite of fear. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories. I’d had the good fortune of seeing several of them in my time.

~ Alan Bradley

What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

Books make the soul float.

~ Alan Bradley

Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you've been or what you've done.

~ Alan Bradley

Cheese! I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

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 that third-floor ironmonger's shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.

~ Alan Bradley

I do not encourage early morning chirpiness, even in those whom I know and love. It is generally a sign of a sloppy mind, and is not to be encouraged.

~ Alan Bradley

You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.

~ Alan Bradley

I visualized myself pulling on my mental thinking cap, jamming it down around my ears as I had taught myself to do. It was a tall, conical wizard's model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.

~ Alan Bradley

Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.

~ Alan Bradley

The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

They seem nice, though, your sisters, really,' Porcelain remarked.'Ha!' I said. 'Shows what little you know! I hate them!''Hate them? I should have thought you'd love them.''Of course I love them,' I said.... 'That's why I'm so good at hating them.

~ Alan Bradley

Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and you're left standing on your own.

~ Alan Bradley

As anybody with two older sisters can tell you, a closed door is like a red rag to a bull. It cannot go unchallenged.

~ Alan Bradley

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic.

~ Alan Bradley

How could tickling, even though it causes laughter, be at the same time such a vicious form of torture?Sitting on the edge of my bed, I thought it through.I came to the conclusion, at last, that it was like this: Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself—ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you—agony.

~ Alan Bradley

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!

~ Alan Bradley

Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.

~ Alan Bradley

I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

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 tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.

~ Alan Bradley

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?

~ Alan Bradley

As Daffy once said, the best place to hide a glum countenance is onstage at the opera.

~ Alan Bradley

How could I tell Clarence that finding another dead body was anything but dreadful? On the contrary: it was thrilling; it was exciting; it was exhilarating, it was invigorating; to say nothing of electrifying and above all, satisfying.How could I tell the dear man that murder made me feel so gloriously alive?

~ Alan Bradley

It's amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one's spirits.

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

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

~ Alan Bradley

There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same.There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been.

~ Alan Bradley

…because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.

~ Alan Bradley

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

~ Alan Bradley

I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation

~ Alan Bradley

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.

~ Alan Bradley

Love is love, wherever you may find it—even when it's covered in feathers.

~ Alan Bradley