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

“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

“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

“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

“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 gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself...”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

“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, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

“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

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

“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

“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

“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

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

“One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.”
― Alan Bradley, The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches

“I was me, I was Flavia. And I loved myself, even if no one else did.”
― Alan Bradley, The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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

“You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.”
― Alan Bradley, Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew'd

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

“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

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

“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

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

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