Top 100 Alan Bradley Quotes
#1. The more I dealt with adults, the less I wanted to be one.
Alan Bradley
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. People who turn pages with licked fingers are as bad as those who wipe their noses on the able linen
Alan Bradley
#5. Ordinarily, anyone who made such a remark to my face would go to the top of my short list for strychnine.
Alan Bradley
#6. 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
#7. You're certain about that?"
"I'm quite competent with the chlorinated hydrocarbons, thank you.
Alan Bradley
#8. 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.
Alan Bradley
#9. Kill him." Dr. Kissing repeated my words in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. "Just so. But 'kill,' as you will have observed, like 'spy' and 'stop,' is really just one more of those short but exceedingly troublesome words.
Alan Bradley
#10. Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.
Alan Bradley
#11. (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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. I must be honest about the fact that I'm made extremely uneasy by excessive noise, and that I do not care for shouted instructions. If I'd been meant to be a sheep, I reasoned, I'd have been born with wool instead of skin.
Alan Bradley
#18. 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.
Alan Bradley
#19. 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
#20. 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.
Alan Bradley
#21. Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and you're left standing on your own.
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. I was proud of my strategy. It was one I had been saving for just such an occasion as this. Who can say no to a personal matter? Even God is curious about such things, which is why He listens to our prayers.
Alan Bradley
#24. Lobsters, snails, crabs, clams, squids, slugs, and members of the European royal families, by contrast, have blue blood, due to the fact that it's based on copper rather than iron.
Alan Bradley
#25. 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
#26. I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction.
Alan Bradley
#27. 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
#28. I realized at once that a great actress can never be greater than when she's starring in her own life.
Alan Bradley
#29. You must never be deflected by unpleasantness. I want you to remember that. Although it may not be apparent to others, your duty will become as clear to you as if it were a white line painted down the middle of the road. You must follow it, Flavia.
Alan Bradley
#30. If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!
Alan Bradley
#31. Give Nature a vacuum and she will try to fill it. Give her localized pressure and she will try to disperse it. She is forever seeking a balance she can never achieve, never happy with what she's got.
Alan Bradley
#32. One of the many happy things about physics is that it works anywhere in the world. No matter whether you're in Bishop's Lacey or Bombay, friction is friction.
Alan Bradley
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. It's amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one's spirits.
Alan Bradley
#37. I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material - something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.
Alan Bradley
#38. I wanted to shake the stuffing out of him; I wanted to hug him; I wanted to die.
Alan Bradley
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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.
Alan Bradley
#43. It is no longer enough simply to solve crimes: We modern private detectives must also be able to come up with catchy names for our cases.
Alan Bradley
#44. I was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang. "Dash it all!" I said. There was nothing I hated more than being interrupted when I was about to do something gratifying with chemicals.
Alan Bradley
#46. 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
#47. There is a certain type of person to whom a closed door is a challenge - a dare, a taunt, a glove thrown down - and I am one of them. A closed door is more than a mystery to be solved: It's an insult. A slap in the face.
Alan Bradley
#48. Mrs. Mullet, when it came to gossip, was equaled only by the News of the World.
Alan Bradley
#49. 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
#50. Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth.
Alan Bradley
#51. You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.
Alan Bradley
#52. Liberals have always been the most fervent Imperialists.
Alan Bradley
#53. I knew that Feely and Daffy would never condescend to respond to a bell "So utterly Pavlovian," Feely said
Alan Bradley
#54. Playing the clown is not an easy task. Clowns, I have come to believe, are placed upon the earth solely to fill the needs of others, while running perilously close to "Empty" themselves.
Alan Bradley
#55. Yaroo!" I shouted, and I didn't give a beetle's bottom who heard me. "Ya-rooo!
Alan Bradley
#56. 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
#57. Dieter, you're a brick!" I shouted. I couldn't help it. Dieter looked as pleased as punch. To him, being called a brick by an English native was probably more precious than a knighthood.
Alan Bradley
#58. 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.
Alan Bradley
#59. The sweater didn't fit me, of course. Even with the sleeves rolled up I looked like a baggy monkey picking bananas. But to my way of thinking, at least in winter, woolly warmth trumps freezing fashion any day of the week.
Alan Bradley
#60. 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
#61. Pulling on a pair of cotton gardening gloves that had been tucked into my belt, and launching into a loudly whistled rendition of "Bibbidi-Bobbidi-Boo," I went to work.
Alan Bradley
#62. ... because I was only eleven years old, I was wrapped in the best cloak of invisibility in the world.
Alan Bradley
#63. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I began to realize why librarians were sometimes able to achieve such pinnacle levels of crankiness: It's because they're in agony.
Alan Bradley
#64. Death by family silver, I thought, before I could turn off that part of my mind.
Alan Bradley
#65. Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.
Alan Bradley
#66. You're in for it this time,' she said. 'Father's been looking for you all afternoon, He's just got off the telephone with Constable Linnet, in the village. I must say he seemed rather dissapointed to hear that they hadn't fished your soggy little corpse out of the duck pond.
Alan Bradley
#67. 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
#68. Father looked puzzled. My witty repartee was completely lost on him.
Alan Bradley
#69. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one, and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories.
Alan Bradley
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Could it be that goodness waxes and wanes like the moon, and that only evil is constant?
Alan Bradley
#73. Any barrier, I had learned
even a potential one
was best breached by pretending urgency.
Alan Bradley
#74. 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
#75. Everything is always a muddle just before it settles in. Tell
Alan Bradley
#76. 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
#77. Love is love, wherever you may find it - even when it's covered in feathers.
Alan Bradley
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. In ordinary circumstances, I would have responded to such a command by sending up a reply that would have given Undine's mother a perm that would be truly everlasting, but I restrained myself.
Alan Bradley
#83. During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.
Alan Bradley
#84. There's an unwritten law of the universe which assures that the thing you seek will always be found in the last place you look. It applies to everything in life from lost socks to misplaced poisons ...
Alan Bradley
#85. Thinking and prayer are much the same thing anyway, when you stop to think about it
if that makes any sense. Prayer goes up and thought comes down
or so it seems. As far as I can tell, that's the only difference.
Alan Bradley
#86. Was it wrong to be so deceitful? Well, yes, it probably was. But if God hadn't wanted me to be the way I am, He would have arranged to have me born a haddock instead of Flavia de Luce - wouldn't He?
Alan Bradley
#87. I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel ... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
Alan Bradley
#88. There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct.
Alan Bradley
#89. You're one of them de Luce girls over from Buckshaw. I'd rec'nize them cold blue eyes anywhere.
Alan Bradley
#90. 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.
Alan Bradley
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Foolishness in a grown man, no matter how lighthearted, is disgusting.
Alan Bradley
#95. 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
#97. True charity, I had discovered, consists in swallowing an invisible flaming sword.
Alan Bradley
#98. 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
#99. Then I remembered that silence can sometimes do more damage than words.
Alan Bradley
#100. I firmly believe it is by sharing such stupid moments as these that we grow into someone other than who we used to be, and I was already feeling an inch taller.
Alan Bradley
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
