Quotes by Alan Bradley

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 youd love them.Of course I love them, I said.... Thats why Im so good at hating them.

Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and youre left standing on your own.

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

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic.

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.

Although it seems shocking to say so, grief is a funny thing. On the one hand, youre 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!

Magic doesn’t work when you’re sad.

I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.

The vicars organized a snow-shoveling party.But why? I asked.It didnt make sense. If all the roads were closed, what use was it clearing a way to the front door?Because, said Aunt Felicitys voice behind me, it is a well-known fact that more than two men shut up together in an enclosed space for more than an hour constitute a hazard to society. If unpleasantness is to be avoided, they must be made to go outdoors and work off their animal spirits.

Not to be too dramatic about it, that night I slept the sleep of the damned. 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 tine aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.

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.

Theres a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, dont we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?

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

How could I tell Clarence that finding another dead body was anything but dreadful? On the contrary: it was thrilling; it was exciting; it was exhilarating, it was invigorating; to say nothing of electrifying and above all, satisfying.How could I tell the dear man that murder made me feel so gloriously alive?

Its amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for ones spirits.

The first thing they would do would be to open my mouth and extract the soggy ball of my handkerchief, and as they spread it out flat on the table beside my white remains, an orange stamp—a stamp belonging to the King—would flutter to the floor: It was like something right out of Agatha Christie.

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

There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never be the same.There is that moment when you can still walk away, but if you do, you will never know what might have been.

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

When youre that age, you sometimes have a great enthusiasm that is very deep and very narrow, and that is something that has always intrigued me-- that world of the eleven-year-old that is so quickly lost.