Alan Bradley

Novelist

1938-10-10

Alan Bradley is a Canadian mystery writer best known for the Flavia de Luce series. He worked in electronics and television engineering before publishing his debut mystery novel.

Quotes by Alan Bradley

One of the things I dread about becoming an adult is that sooner or later you begin letting sentimentality get in the way of simple logic.
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As anybody with two older sisters can tell you, a closed door is like a red rag to a bull. It cannot go unchallenged.
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Growing up is like that, I suppose. The strings fall away and you're left standing on your own.
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They seem nice, though, your sisters, really,' Porcelain remarked.'Ha!' I said. 'Shows what little you know! I hate them!''Hate them? I should have thought you'd love them.''Of course I love them,' I said.... 'That's why I'm so good at hating them.
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While you've been gadding about the countryside, we've held a meeting, and we've all of us decided that you must go.'In short, we've voted you out of the family,' Daffy said. 'It was unanimous.
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The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.
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Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn't it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I've tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.
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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.
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You can learn from a glance at anyone's library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.
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I do not encourage early morning chirpiness, even in those whom I know and love. It is generally a sign of a sloppy mind, and is not to be encouraged.
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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.
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Cheese! I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me.
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Mother Goose!I have never much cared for flippant remarks, especially when others make them, and in particular, I don't give a frog's fundament for them when they come from an adult.
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I remembered that Beethoven's symphonies had sometimes been given names... they should have call [the Fifth] the Vampire, because it simply refused to lie down and die.
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Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you've been or what you've done.
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Books make the soul float.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I have no fear of the dead. Indeed in my own limited experience I have found them to produce in me a feeling that is quite the opposite of fear. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one and I have learned that most corpses tell better stories. I'd had the good fortune of seeing several of them in my time.
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