Alan Bradley Quotes

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.

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.

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 couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.

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.

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.

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

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.

Mother Goose!

I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I don't give a frog's fundament for them when they come from an adult.

Nature does abhor a vacuum, but she equally abhors pressure.

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.

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

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.

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.

Wrapped up in the music, I threw myself into an overstuffed chair and let my legs dangle over the arm, the position in which Nature intended music to be listened to, and for the first time in days I felt the muscles in my neck relaxing.

There had fallen between us what Dogger once referred to as "a companionable silence," a little parcel of time during which neither of us felt any particular need to talk.

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.

Yaroo!" I shouted, and I didn't give a beetle's bottom who heard me. "Ya-rooo!