Kathleen

“Feigning stupidity was one of my specialties. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.”
― Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

“There’s something in human nature, I’m beginning to learn, that makes an adult, when speaking to a younger person, magnify the little things and shrink the big ones. It’s like looking—or talking—through a kind of word-telescope that, no matter which end they choose, distorts the truth. Your mistakes are always magnified and your victories shrunken.”
― Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust

“This story is one truth among others: a knitting together of objective facts and subjective probabilities.”
― Yannick Grannec, The Goddess of Small Victories: A Novel of Gödel's Wife

“Anne of Green Gables was cuddled up next to Huckleberry Finn; The Hunchback of Notre Dame was wedged tightly between Heidi and Little Women; and Nicholas Nickleby leaned in a familiar way against A Girl of the Limberlost. None of the books were in alphabetical order, which made it necessary to cock my head sideways to read each one of the spines. By the end of the third shelf I had begun to realize why librarians are sometimes able to achieve such pinnacles of crankiness: It’s because they’re in agony. If only publishers could be persuaded, I thought, to stamp all book titles horizontally instead of vertically, a great deal of unpleasantness could be avoided all round.”
― Alan Bradley, As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust