Alan Bradley Quotes

I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material - something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.

I put a hand gently on her shoulder and held out my handkerchief. She looked at it skeptically. "It's all right," I said. "They're only grass stains.

There wasn't a schoolboy on the planet - or a man, for that matter - who would dare disturb a female locked into a WC. I knew that for a fact.

Brookie was a good boy," she said, "but he did not grow up to be a good man. He had the fatal gift of making people believe him.

Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes.

Magic doesn't work when you're sad.

Hesternal, I remembered, meant, "pertaining to yesterday." I was nodding over the rest of the phrase

Perhaps the wind blows anger away.

Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles.

The more I dealt with adults, the less I wanted to be one.

Then I remembered that silence can sometimes do more damage than words.

Older sisters are much alike the world over: half a cup of love and half one of contempt.

She consumed books like a whale eats krill.

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

Translation: She was perishing with nosiness.

Die, witch, I managed, making a cross of my forefingers.

I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself ...

I was the eighth dwarf. Sneaky.

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

And it was signed simply "George.

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

Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.

As I am now, so you must be, So Friend, prepare to follow me

Books make the soul float.

If you need me, I shall be weeping at the bottom of my wardrobe.

Sometimes I hated myself but not for long.

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

If God meant for pictures to be sent through the air He'd have never would have given us cinema. Or the national gallery.

It was like a bit of flypaper stuck to your finger that you couldn't shake off. The bloody thing clung to life like a limpet.

I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell "So utterly Pavlovian," Feely said

I was me, I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.

If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.

During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.

Everyone else in the world is sorry. Dare to be something more than that.

As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments: Consider also the container.

Oxidation, I never tire of reminding myself, is what happens when oxygen attacks.

Oh, there you are, you odious little prawn...

It is not the dead who are to be feared, I thought, but rather the living. Only the living can cast you down among the dead.

I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction.

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?

If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.

Revenge is my specialty.

I threw my hands up into the air and launched myself into a series of exuberant triple cartwheels. "Yaroo!" I shouted.

For all practical purposes, Feely's enthusiasms stopped where her skin ended.

In the old legends, anyone who willingly took up the Earth upon their shoulders was doomed to carry it forever: a curse, it seemed, with no way out.

It is always better, and far more rewarding, I have observed, to have someone else feel sorry for you, than to do the job yourself.

Authors are known to have fiendishly clever minds, and the authors of children's books are more fiendishly clever than most. What

Spare us the pout, there's enough lip in the world without you adding to it.

Yaroo!" I shouted, and I didn't give a beetle's bottom who heard me. "Ya-rooo!

A peculiar feeling passed over me
or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain.

Saint Paul on the road to Damascus might have pleaded sunstroke, for example, and the world would have been a different place.

The Hinley pond-poet Herbert Miles had referred to us as "that gaggle o' geese who gossip gaily 'pon the gladdening green," and there

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

A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.

I'm very sorry about your mother, Flavia. I can't even begin to imagine how you must feel. At least the man had the sense to admit it.

The very best people are like that. They don't entangle you like flypaper.

I have always found there to be a certain sadness about mirrors, since they double the space in a house which needs to be filled with love.

You lie like one of us.

There are things that are worse than glass and crocodiles.

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

It was the chemistry that caused this lifting of the spirits. Chemistry lifted you up out of the mud and flung you up among the stars. Except,

Tea. It was not a perfect way to live one's life,

No point in wasting time with false vanity when you possess the real thing.

Mrs. Mullet, when it came to gossip, was equaled only by the News of the World.

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

Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.

I wanted to shake the stuffing out of him; I wanted to hug him; I wanted to die.

Ordinarily, anyone who made such a remark to my face would go to the top of my short list for strychnine.

I have learned that under certain circumstances, a fib is not only permissible, but can even be an act of perfect grace.

Not yet evaluated. She has left it to me to

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

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

One of the things I love about myself is my ability to remain open to suggestion.

it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

True charity, I had discovered, consists in swallowing an invisible flaming sword.

The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.

Girl be blowed!" I snapped. "I'm here as a brain, not as a female.

This was an interesting thought; it had never occurred to me that one's name could be a compass.

Even in complete silence, Buckshaw had its own unique silence; a silence I would recognize anywhere.

Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!

The storm is directly overhead," Father said.

Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue.

Liberals have always been the most fervent Imperialists.

You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish.

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.

Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,
Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?

I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them.
'How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.

Was the pie good, luv?" she asked.
I'd forgotten the pie until that moment. I took a leaf from Dr. Darby's notebook.
"Um," I said.

Father looked puzzled. My witty repartee was completely lost on him.

What else?"
Nothing," Dogger said. "Just sign it. "Kings prefer brevity.

A pillar of strength, Daffy had once remarked, was a nice way of saying someone was terminally bossy,

Everything is always a muddle just before it settles in. Tell

Foolishness in a grown man, no matter how lighthearted, is disgusting.

Could it be that goodness waxes and wanes like the moon, and that only evil is constant?

Tolstoy had written something about happy families being all alike and unhappy ones each unhappy in its own way.

We Three Kings of Leicester Square,
Selling ladies' underwear,
So fantastic, no elastic,
Only tuppence a pair.

Tell them we may not be praying with them," Father told the Vicar, "but we are at least not actively praying against them.

She's only been here a year and she's already as rich as Croesus.

You're certain about that?"

"I'm quite competent with the chlorinated hydrocarbons, thank you.

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