Top 100 Alan Bradley Quotes
#1. You're one of them de Luce girls over from Buckshaw. I'd rec'nize them cold blue eyes anywhere.
Alan Bradley
#2. I reached out and touched his hands and they stilled at once. I had observed - although I did not often make use of the fact - that there were times when a touch could say things that words could not.
Alan Bradley
#3. Could it be that goodness waxes and wanes like the moon, and that only evil is constant?
Alan Bradley
#4. Feely had the knack of being able to screw one side of her face into a witchlike horror while keeping the other as sweet and demure as any maiden from Tennyson. It was perhaps, the one thing I envied her.
Alan Bradley
#5. I wish I could say I was afraid, but I wasn't. Quite the contrary. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened to me in my entire life
Alan Bradley
#6. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
Alan Bradley
#7. Tell them we may not be praying with them," Father told the Vicar, "but we are at least not actively praying against them.
Alan Bradley
#8. ... because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.
Alan Bradley
#9. A long hallway, hung profusely with dark, water-stained sporting prints, served as a lobby, in which centuries of sacrificed kippers had left the smell of their smoky souls clinging to the wallpaper. Only the patch of sunshine visible through the open front door relieved the gloom
Alan Bradley
#10. Yaroo!" I shouted, and I didn't give a beetle's bottom who heard me. "Ya-rooo!
Alan Bradley
#11. The Hinley pond-poet Herbert Miles had referred to us as "that gaggle o' geese who gossip gaily 'pon the gladdening green," and there
Alan Bradley
#13. The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep.
Alan Bradley
#14. As was your mother, you have been given the fatal gift of genius. Because of it, your life will not be an easy one - nor must you expect it to be. You must remember always that great gifts come at great cost.
Alan Bradley
#15. Perhaps, I thought, whenever we began to breathe the breath of others, when the spinning atoms of their bodies began to mingle withour own, we took on something of their personality, like crystals in a snowflake. Perhaps we became something more, yet something lesser than ourselves.
Alan Bradley
#16. I remembered Father remarking once that if rudeness was not attributable to ignorance it could be taken as a sure sign that one was speaking to a member of the aristocracy.
Alan Bradley
#17. I had concocted the gunpowder myself from niter, sulfur, charcoal, and a happy heart. When working with explosives, I've found that attitude is everything.
Alan Bradley
#18. I had to make water " I said. It was the classic female excuse and no male in recorded history had ever questioned it.
"I see " the Inspector said and left it at that.
Later I would have a quick piddle behind the caravan for insurance purposes. No one would be any the wiser.
Alan Bradley
#19. In the December rain, the vicarage was especially damp and soggy, with an aura of boiled eggs and old books - a perfect setting for our encounter: dark, brooding, and simply reeking of secrets and tales told in an earlier time. Cynthia,
Alan Bradley
#20. Love is love, wherever you may find it - even when it's covered in feathers.
Alan Bradley
#21. It was a lie and I detected it at once. As an accomplished fibber myself, I spotted the telltale signs of an untruth before they were halfway out of his mouth: the excessive detail, the offhand delivery, and the wrapping-up of it all in casual chitchat.
Alan Bradley
#22. Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never tired of talking about. I always woke up before the plane landed.
Alan Bradley
#23. Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and you're left standing on your own.
Alan Bradley
#24. I suddenly realized that there's something about singing hymns with a large group of people that sharpens the senses remarkably. I stored this observation away for later use; it was a jolly good thing to know for anyone practicing the art of detection.
Alan Bradley
#25. TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.
Alan Bradley
#26. It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.
Alan Bradley
#27. Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet's seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, 'Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?
Alan Bradley
#28. We might as well face it: Death is a bore. It is even harder on the survivors than on the deceased, who at least don't have to worry about when to sit and when to stand, or when to permit a pale smile and when to glance tragically away.
Alan Bradley
#29. (The doorbell rang) ... I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell ("So utterly Pavlovian," Feely said) ...
Keep warm feet and a cool head, and you'll never find yourself sneezing in bed.
Alan Bradley
#30. Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.
Alan Bradley
#31. How I longed to tell her about Harriet
but somehow I could not. The grief in the room belonged to Porcelain and I realized, almost at once, that it would be selfish to rob her of it in any way.
Alan Bradley
#32. People who turn pages with licked fingers are as bad as those who wipe their noses on the able linen
Alan Bradley
#33. I lay for a long time in silence, staring at the ceiling. Was my life always to be like this? I wondered. Was it going to go, forever, in an instant, from sunshine to shadow? From pandemonium to loneliness? From fierce anger to a fiercer kind of love?
Alan Bradley
#34. Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth.
Alan Bradley
#35. Toccata by Pietro Domenico Paradisi - the one from his Sonata in A Major - come tripping out to meet me. The Toccata was my favorite composition; to my mind it was the greatest musical accomplishment in the entire history of the world, but I knew that if Ophelia found that out,
Alan Bradley
#36. Mrs. Mullet, when it came to gossip, was equaled only by the News of the World.
Alan Bradley
#37. If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie.
Alan Bradley
#38. Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that's the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hypnotists who ever lived.
Alan Bradley
#39. Mirages of happiness, I thought. If you walk towards them, they will never grow any closer. Eventually they will vanish into thin air, like the Lady of the Lake.
Alan Bradley
#40. I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction.
Alan Bradley
#41. 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.
Alan Bradley
#42. Keep quiet about a toothpick in today's butter and next thing you know you'll be findin' a doorknob in the cottage cheese.
Alan Bradley
#43. I want to know who I am before it is too late - before I am no longer the same person - before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are others when it seems to matter not a tinker's curse.
Alan Bradley
#44. Although I was flattered to be classed as a grown-up, I was not all that fond of oolong tea, which I found to leave a fishy taste in your mouth and a faint craving for rice.
Alan Bradley
#45. Tolstoy had written something about happy families being all alike and unhappy ones each unhappy in its own way.
Alan Bradley
#46. If you need me, I shall be weeping at the bottom of my wardrobe.
Alan Bradley
#47. Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure.
Alan Bradley
#48. Although Fate loves coincidences, it does not chew its cabbage twice.
Alan Bradley
#49. Inspector Hewitt flicked on the defroster to evaporate the condensation our words were forming on the windscreen.
Alan Bradley
#50. Why don't they embed the dead in blocks of plate glass and bury them in crypts beneath transparent floors? In that way, the deceased would easily be able to see God for themselves, and He to see them,
Alan Bradley
#51. As I am now, so you must be, So Friend, prepare to follow me
Alan Bradley
#52. The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.
Alan Bradley
#53. 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
#54. That was just it, wasn't it? That's what we were: dwellers all in time and space. Not old scraps of iron lashed together like a Meccano set by some invisible builder - not on your bloody life!
Alan Bradley
#55. Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes.
Alan Bradley
#56. Saint Paul on the road to Damascus might have pleaded sunstroke, for example, and the world would have been a different place.
Alan Bradley
#57. A pillar of strength, Daffy had once remarked, was a nice way of saying someone was terminally bossy,
Alan Bradley
#58. 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
#59. Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!
Alan Bradley
#60. You never know what you're getting into when you stick your nose in other people's rubbish.
Alan Bradley
#61. I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them.
'How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.
Alan Bradley
#62. Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself - ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you - agony.
Alan Bradley
#63. I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself ...
Alan Bradley
#65. There's nothing that a liar hates more than finding out that another liar has lied to them.
Alan Bradley
#68. 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
#69. 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.
Alan Bradley
#70. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold. The reason for this, of course, is that while you're gleefully anticipating the event, the victim has plenty of time to worry about when, where, and how you're going to strike.
Alan Bradley
#71. Once, when I remarked that she looked like a disoriented bandicoot, she leapt up from the piano bench and beat me within an inch of my life with a rolled-up piano sonata by Schubert. Ophelia has no sense of humor.
Alan Bradley
#72. Poor Dogger! That's what I thought, even though Daphne told me I should never say that about anyone: "It's not only condescending, it fails to take into account the future," she said.
Alan Bradley
#74. I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.
Alan Bradley
#75. These (all the poor Remains of State) Adorn the Rich, or praise the Great; Who while on Earth in Fame they live, Are senseless of the Fame they give. Thomas
Alan Bradley
#76. The first step in gaining the upper hand is always to seize the moral high ground, and to be able to do this with no more than a single word is nothing short of genius. I
Alan Bradley
#77. I have to admit, though, that Cynthia was a great organizer, but then, so were the men with whips who got the pyramids built.
Alan Bradley
#78. I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.
Alan Bradley
#79. Oxidation, I never tire of reminding myself, is what happens when oxygen attacks.
Alan Bradley
#80. 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.
Alan Bradley
#81. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.
Alan Bradley
#82. For all practical purposes, Feely's enthusiasms stopped where her skin ended.
Alan Bradley
#83. My head was spinning. I could think of nothing better to calm it down than the Oxford English Dictionary.
Alan Bradley
#84. Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky.
Alan Bradley
#85. Horehound sticks are meant to be shared with friends, don't you think?' She was dead wrong about that: Horehound sticks were meant to be gobbled down in solitary gluttony, and preferably in a locked room, but I didn't dare say so.
Alan Bradley
#87. ...and I realized not without a sinking feeling that he was already completely in Feely's thrall, hanging on her every word like ball on a rubber string, nodding like a demented woodpecker, and grinning like a fool.
Alan Bradley
#88. As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes
or so the Vicar had remarked to Father ...
Alan Bradley
#89. How could I possibly learn to survive in such a pagan place, where trams were streetcars, vans and lorries were trucks, pavements were sidewalks, jumpers were sweaters, petrol was gasoline, aluminium was aluminum, sweets were candy, a full stop was a period, and cheerio was goodbye?
Alan Bradley
#90. Now, glancing over ... as she knelt with her eyes closed, her fingertips touching and pointed to Heaven, and her lips shaping soft words of devotion, I had to pinch myself to keep in mind that I was sitting next to the Devil's Hairball.
Alan Bradley
#91. Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue.
Alan Bradley
#92. Sometimes I hated myself but not for long.
Alan Bradley
#93. The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.
Alan Bradley
#94. She's only been here a year and she's already as rich as Croesus.
Alan Bradley
#95. There are things that are worse than glass and crocodiles.
Alan Bradley
#96. Girl be blowed!" I snapped. "I'm here as a brain, not as a female.
Alan Bradley
#97. 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.
Alan Bradley
#98. Tea. It was not a perfect way to live one's life,
Alan Bradley
#99. The storm is directly overhead," Father said.
Alan Bradley
#100. The press was ruthless, but then so was the church.
Flavia de Luce
Alan Bradley
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