LJ

“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 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

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