Quotes by Alan Bradley

“These are two rare title triumphs for us and its fantastic they have come at a special time for the club.”

If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside ones 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.

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

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.

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.

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 couldnt see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

But when oxidation nibbles more slowly - more delicately, like a tortoise - at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business consuming everything from hairpins to whole civilizations.

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.

Books make the soul float.

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

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

I remembered that Beethovens symphonies had sometimes been given names... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.

Mother Goose!I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I dont give a frogs fundament for them when they come from an adult.

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 ironmongers 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.

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.

You can learn from a glance at anyones library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.

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 wizards model, covered with chemical equations and formulae: a cornucopia of ideas.

Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.

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

While youve been gadding about the countryside, weve held a meeting, and weve all of us decided that you must go.In short, weve voted you out of the family, Daffy said. It was unanimous.