Best 94 quotes of Alan Bradley on MyQuotes

Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.

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.

Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.

During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.

Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.

Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never tired of talking about. I always woke up before the plane landed.

I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material - something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.

If poisons were ponies, I'd put my money on cyanide.

I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.

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.

I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.

TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.

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.

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

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

. . . and there was for a moment an unbreakable bond between us: the eternal bond of chemistry. I glowed with all the fire of a newborn galaxy.

Are you provoking your sister again, Flavia," Father asked, looking up from his journal, but leaving a forefinger on the page to mark his place. "I was trying to discuss current events," I said. "But she doesn't seem much interested." "Ah," Father said, and went back to reading about plate flaws in the 1840 tuppenny blue.

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

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

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

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 ironmonger's 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.

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.

Change is unwelcome in prisons and hospitals. It is only their sameness which makes them tolerable to those kept captive within their walls.

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

Do What?' 'Lie,' he said. 'Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?' 'Well,' I wanted to say, 'there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city of walls.' I didn't say that, of course. What I did say was: 'I don't know.

Feely, it seemed, was, as Sherlock Holmes once called Dr. Watson, "the one fixed point in a changing world." Throughout the events of the past few days, Feely had somehow managed to remain her same unpleasant self. Could it be that goodness wanes and waxes like the moon, and that only evil is constant?

Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is not so simple as it sounds. What it means, in fact, is being charitable--which, as the vicar is fond of pointing out, is the most difficult of the graces to master. Faith and hope are a piece of cake but charity is a Pandora's box: the monster in the cistern which, when the lid is opened, comes swarming out to seize you by the throat.

Gorging on sweets together creates as strong a bond between two people as being in love.

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

Have you ever wondered, Dogger," I asked, "if wickedness is a chemical state?" "Indeed I have, Miss Flavia," he said. "I have sometimes thought of little else.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

How very kind of her, ' I said. 'I must remember to send her a card.' I'd send her a card alright. It would be the Ace of Spades, and I'd mail it anonymously from somewhere other than Bishop's Lacey.

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

Alone in my room, I pondered the evidence. A perfect phrase. I would jot it down for future use. Like it or not, there are times when you need to be alone; times when you need to be lonely; times when you need to need other people.

I could tell he was becoming sulky, as boys and men do when they're caught bluffing. And I ignored him, as girls and women do when they catch them out.

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.

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.

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.

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

I had concocted the gunpowder myself from niter, sulfur, charcoal, and a happy heart. When working with explosives, I've found that attitude is everything.

I had once remarked to Feely that, because of the oxygen, breathing fresh air was like breathing God, but she had slapped my face and told me I was being blasphemous.