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Alan Bradley Quotes | Quotes said by Alan Bradley

  • Alan Bradley Quote #1

    ...I found my eyes repelled by hers as if they were the like poles of a pair of magnets.


  • Alan Bradley Quote #2

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

  • Alan Bradley Quote #3

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

  • Alan Bradley Quote #4

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

  • Alan Bradley Quote #5

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

  • Alan Bradley Quote #6

    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 Quote #7

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

  • Alan Bradley Quote #8

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

  • Alan Bradley Quote #9

    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.

  • Alan Bradley Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

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

  • Alan Bradley Quote #12

    Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.

  • Alan Bradley Quote #13

    Do What?'
    'Lie,' he said. 'Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?'
    'Well,' I wanted to say, 'there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city of walls.'
    I didn't say that, of course. What I did say was: 'I don't know.

  • Alan Bradley Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    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 Quote #16

    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 Quote #17

    How very kind of her, ' I said. 'I must remember to send her a card.'

    I'd send her a card alright. It would be the Ace of Spades, and I'd mail it anonymously from somewhere other than Bishop's Lacey.

  • Alan Bradley Quote #18

    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 Quote #19

    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 Quote #20

    I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before.
    It was homesickness.
    Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.

  • Alan Bradley Quote #21

    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 Quote #22

    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 Quote #23

    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 Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    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 Quote #26

    I remembered that Johnson had declared portrait painting to be an improper employment for a woman. “Public practice of any art and staring in men’s faces is very indelicate in a female,” he had said.

    Well I’d seen Dr. Johnson’s face in the book’s frontispiece and I couldn’t imagine anyone male or female wanting to stare into it for any length of time —the man was an absolute toad.

  • Alan Bradley Quote #27

    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 Quote #28

    I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table.

    As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond something at the root of my tongue leapt like a little goat and my stomach turned over. There are not many things that I despise but chiefest among them is skin on milk. I loathe it with a passion.
    Not even the thought of the marvelous chemical change that forms the stuff—the milk’s proteins churned and ripped apart by the heat of boiling then reassembling themselves as they cool into a jellied skin—was enough to console me. I would rather eat a cobweb.

  • Alan Bradley Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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