Alan Bradley Quotes

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

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.

Simple pleasures are best.

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.

On listening to Gute Nacht Aus Schuberts Winterreise

Great music has much the same effect upon humans as cyanide, I managed to think: It paralyzes the respiratory system.

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

He gave me the kind of skeptical look that I expect to get from Saint Peter on judgement day.

Saving a life is not servile, no matter how it looks.

There are things that are worse than glass and crocodiles.

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

That's him!" he said. "That's the one!"
"Is it, indeed?" Inspector Hewitt asked, as he lifted the cap from my head and took the gown from my shoulders with the gentle deference of a valet.
The little man's pale blue eyes bulged visibly in their sockets.
"Why, it's only a girl!" he said.
I could have slapped his face.

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.

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.

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

Whenever I'm a little blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.

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.

There's something in human nature, I'm beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It's like looking - or talking - through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken.

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.

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

I sometimes suffer from an excess of zeal.

Silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.

How can I help?" I asked, as Anglicans have been taught to do - and in spite of the fact that our family have been Roman Catholics since St. Peter was a sailor.

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.

Magic doesn't work when you're sad.

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.

...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.

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

You are unreliable, Flavia,' he said. 'Utterly unreliable.'
Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.

I waved my hand like a frantic dust mop fingers spread ludicrously wide apart as if to say "What jolly fun " What I wanted to do actually was to leap to my feet strike a pose and burst into one of those "Yo-ho for the open road " songs they always play in the cinema musicals but I stifled the urge and settled for a ghastly grin and an extra twiddle of the fingers.

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.

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.

I called Miss Daphne, but she says she doesn't want 'er tea. She's got 'er nose stuck in a book. Useless, I think it's called, by some woman named Joyce.

Keep quiet about a toothpick in today's butter and next thing you know you'll be findin' a doorknob in the cottage cheese.

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

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.

You lie like one of us.

It's a fact of life that a girl can tell in a flash if another girl likes her ... Between girls there is a silent and unending flow of invisible signals, like the high-frequency wireless messages between the shore and the ships at sea, and this secret flow of dots and dashes was signaling that Mary detested me.

Shortly after his launch into eternity, Bonepenney's room at the inn is rifled by a maiden fair whose name I dare not utter aloud but who now sits demurely before me ...

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

I was the eighth dwarf. Sneaky.

I almost clasped my hands together. This amazing man was so noble he might have been born in armor and on horseback, ready-equipped with shield and lance.

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.

Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.

Humility is a most excellent barometer," he said, "and ought to be looked for in all those we are made to look up to.

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

Any barrier, I had learned
even a potential one
was best breached by pretending urgency.

I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren's hands.

Why then had I heard nothing? Everyone knows that the killing of a human being requires the exertion of a certain amount of mechanical energy. I forget the exact formula, although I know there is one.

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

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.

I looked at my surroundings but there wasn't much to see. In the feeble glow of the single bulb above the music rack, Feely and I might as well have been castaways on a tiny raft of light in a sea of darkness. By

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.

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.

There's nothing that a liar hates more than finding out that another liar has lied to them.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Sanctified cyanide
Super-quick arsenic
Higgledy-piggledy
Into the Soup.
Put out the mourning lamps
Call for coffin clamps
Teach them to trifle with
Flavia de Luce!

I dwelt there by choice in privacy and peace.

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

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

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

Flitch, a former tailor who, in the seventeenth century, had founded the Hobblers, a religious sect named for the peculiar shackled gait they adopted as they paced out their prayers. The Hobblers' beliefs seemed to be based largely on such novel ideas as that heaven was handily located six miles above the earth's surface, and that Nicodemus Flitch had been appointed personally by God as His mouthpiece and, as such, was licensed to curse souls to eternity, whenever he felt like it.

There was no way out; not, at least, in this direction. I was like a hamster that had climbed to the top of the ladder in its cage and found there was nowhere to go but down. But surely hamsters knew in their hamster hearts that escape was futile; it was only we humans who were incapable of accepting our own helplessness.

I'm sorry if I seem to digress, but that is precisely what I was thinking at the moment. It's the way my mind works. Things are not the same in real life as they are in, for instance, the fictional world of Sherlock Holmes. Brains, in reality, do not go clickety-clickety-clickety-click from A to B to C to D and so forth, rushing like a train along the rails, until at the end, with a happy "Toot-toot!" they arrive at their destination, Z, and the case is suddenly solved. Quite the contrary. In reality, analytical minds such as my own are forever shooting wildly off in all directions simultaneously. It's like joyously hitting jelly with a sledgehammer; like exploding galaxies; like a display of fireworks in which the pyrotechnic engineer has had a bit too much to drink and set off the whole conglobulation all at once, by accident.

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

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

People love to talk
especially when the talking involves answering the questions of others
because it makes them feel wanted. [ ... ] I had long ago discovered that the best way to obtain answers about anything was to walk up to the closest person and ask.

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 ...

Revenge is my specialty.

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.

You're certain about that?"

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

I flipped on the switch marked "Shuddering Sobs," but nothing came.
Damnation! I used to be a dab hand at water on demand. What on earth was happening to me? Was I becoming hardened? Was this what being twelve was going to be like?

You're one of them de Luce girls over from Buckshaw. I'd rec'nize them cold blue eyes anywhere.

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

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

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.

Why do people always quote hamlet when they want to seem clever?

Hmmm," he said. "Quite a novel idea, I must say. But hardly conducive to a bestselling, tell-all, no-holds-barred biography.

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.

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

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

I've always been amazed by the ease with which a stranger's life can be reconstructed by simply snooping through their belongings. Art and imagination combine to tell a tale that's more complete than even a fat printed biography could ever hope to equal. And Mr. Denning was no exception: His secrets were laid so bare that I felt I ought to be apologizing.

My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.

Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself - ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you - agony.

It says somewhere - in the Book of Proverbs, I think - that lying lips are abomination to the Lord, but they that deal truly are his delight. I considered my words carefully before I spoke them.

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.

If you're insinuating that my personal hygiene is not up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes.

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.

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

If there is anything more delicious than a sausage roasted over an open Bunsen burner, I can't image what it might be
Porcelain and I tore into our food like cannibals after a missionary famine.

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

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.

Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death; lived for death; lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.

Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, and anyone else I've managed to leave out–

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
No ... eight days a week.

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

IT WAS ONE OF those glorious days in March when the air was so fresh that you worshipped every whiff of it; that each breath of the intoxicating stuff created such new universes in your lungs and brain you were certain you were about to explode with sheer joy; one of those blustery days of scudding clouds and piddling showers and gum boots and wind-blown brollies that made you know you were truly alive.