Alan Bradley > Quotes

“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.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“Tell them we may not be praying with them," Father told the Vicar, "but we are at least not actively praying against them.”
― Alan Bradley

“You are unreliable, Flavia,' he said. 'Utterly unreliable.'
Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me:
"If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!"
Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Casanovas were located.
I'd have to think of something else.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them.

How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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, I Am Half Sick Of Shadows

“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. ”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest for myself...”
― Alan Bradley

“Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet's seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, 'Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“...silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Simple pleasures are best.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“There's a lot to be said for being alone. But you and I know, don't we, Flavia, that being alone and being lonely are not at all the same thing?”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“She consumed books like a whale eats krill.”
― Alan Bradley

“If you’re insinuating that my personal hygiene is not up to the same high standard as yours you can go suck my galoshes.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines.
But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger--even miles away--has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it "woman's intuition.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“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, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“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, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“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.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Unless some sweetness at the bottom lie,
Who cares for all the crinkling of the pie?”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Still, one of my Rules of Life is this: When you want something, bite your tongue.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“As he drank, I remembered that there's a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty's Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes--or so the Vicar had remarked to Father...”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Horehound sticks are meant to be shared with friends, don't you think?' She was dead wrong about that: Horehound sticks were meant to be gobbled down in solitary gluttony, and preferably in a locked room, but I didn't dare say so.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended legs, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face ... "Vale."

The thrill of it all!

Yes," I said, "it was devastating.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“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.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“I have to admit, though, that Cynthia was a great organizer, but then, so were the men with whips who got the pyramids built.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“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.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat. That simple fact was the first great discovery of my life.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Cheese!" I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“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.”
― Alan Bradley

“The woman was putting her purse in the drawer and settling down behind the desk, and I realized I had never seen her before in my life. Her face was as wrinkled as one of those forgotten apples you sometimes find in the pocket of last year's winter jacket.

Yes?" she said, peering over her spectacles. They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“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!”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

“Death by family silver, I thought, before I could turn off that part of my mind.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“I had long ago discovered that when a word or formula refused to come to mind the best thing for it was to think of something else: tigers for instance or oatmeal. Then when the fugitive word was least expecting it I would suddenly turn the full blaze of my attention back onto it catching the culprit in the beam of my mental torch before it could sneak off again into the darkness.”
― Alan Bradley, A Red Herring Without Mustard

“If you need me, I shall be weeping at the bottom of my wardrobe.”
― Alan Bradley, The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag