Top 200 Alan Bradley Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Alan Bradley

2. “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. Hebrews 13:2.”

— Alan Bradley

3. “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

4. “To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.”

— Alan Bradley

5. “Sometimes, when Fate deals you into a game you weren’t expecting, you can only play your cards to the best of your ability.”

— Alan Bradley

6. “Poison and Passion, I have discovered, are as closely connected as Laurel and Hardy.”

— Alan Bradley

7. “One of the many happy things about physics is that it works anywhere in the world. No matter whether you’re in Bishop’s Lacey or Bombay, friction is friction.”

— Alan Bradley

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

— Alan Bradley

9. “I’m sorry I said it twice,” Undine said. “I sometimes suffer from an excess of zeal.”

— Alan Bradley

10. “In the December rain, the vicarage was especially damp and soggy, with an aura of boiled eggs and old books – a perfect setting for our encounter: dark, brooding, and simply reeking of secrets and tales told in an earlier time.”

— Alan Bradley

11. “Compared with my life Cinderella was a spoiled brat.”

— Alan Bradley

12. “I dwelt there by choice in privacy and peace.”

— Alan Bradley

13. “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

14. “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

15. “If poisons were ponies, I’d put my money on cyanide.”

— Alan Bradley

16. “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

17. “Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, and anyone else I’ve managed to leave out–.”

— Alan Bradley

18. “I do not encourage early morning chirpiness, even in those I love. It is generally a sign of a sloppy mind, and is not to be encouraged... Flavia de Luce – Thrice the Brinded Cat Hath Mew’d.”

— Alan Bradley

19. “So that was it. As at a birth, so at a death. Without so much as a kiss-me-quick-and-mind-the-marmalade, the only female in sight is enlisted to trot off and see that the water is boiled. Rustle something up, indeed! What did he take me for, some kind of cowboy?”

— Alan Bradley

20. “Keep quiet about a toothpick in today’s butter and next thing you know you’ll be findin’ a doorknob in the cottage cheese.”

— Alan Bradley

21. “Oxidation, I never tire of reminding myself, is what happens when oxygen attacks.”

— Alan Bradley

22. “Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend.”

— Alan Bradley

23. “Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!”

— Alan Bradley

24. “A peculiar feeling passed over me – or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain.”

— Alan Bradley

25. “Good morning, Flavia,” she said at last, but her acknowledgment of my presence came too late for my liking.”

— Alan Bradley

26. “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

27. “History is like the kitchen sink,” Adam answered. “Everything goes round and round until eventually, sooner or later, most of it goes down the waste pipe. Things are forgotten. Things are mislaid. Things are covered up. Sometimes, it’s simply a matter of neglect.”

— Alan Bradley

28. “As was your mother, you have been given the fatal gift of genius. Because of it, your life will not be an easy one – nor must you expect it to be. You must remember always that great gifts come at great cost.”

— Alan Bradley

29. “One of the marks of a truly great mind, I had discovered, is the ability to feign stupidity on demand.”

— Alan Bradley

30. “People who have been offended are entitled to a short sulk, as long as it doesn’t drag on too long.”

— Alan Bradley

31. “I remembered Father remarking once that if rudeness was not attributable to ignorance it could be taken as a sure sign that one was speaking to a member of the aristocracy.”

— Alan Bradley

32. “I was being resisted by millions of tiny crystals, I knew, but the strength of their chemical bonds was enormous. If all of us could be like snow, I thought, how happy we should be.”

— Alan Bradley

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

— Alan Bradley

34. “The very best people are like that. They don’t entangle you like flypaper.”

— Alan Bradley

35. “I gave her a partial smile and kept the rest of it for myself...”

— Alan Bradley

36. “Tickling and learning were much the same thing. When you tickle yourself – ecstasy; but when anyone else tickles you – agony.”

— Alan Bradley

37. “Playing the clown is not an easy task. Clowns, I have come to believe, are placed upon the earth solely to fill the needs of others, while running perilously close to “Empty” themselves.”

— Alan Bradley

38. “That was just it, wasn’t it? That’s what we were: dwellers all in time and space. Not old scraps of iron lashed together like a Meccano set by some invisible builder – not on your bloody life!”

— Alan Bradley

39. “Revenge is my specialty.”

— Alan Bradley

40. “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.”

— Alan Bradley

41. “Everything is always a muddle just before it settles in. Tell.”

— Alan Bradley

42. “As Uncle Tarquin de Luce once wrote in the margin of one of his many notebooks of chemical experiments: Consider also the container.”

— Alan Bradley

43. “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.”

— Alan Bradley

44. “I firmly believe it is by sharing such stupid moments as these that we grow into someone other than who we used to be, and I was already feeling an inch taller.”

— Alan Bradley

45. “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.”

— Alan Bradley

46. “Love is love, wherever you may find it – even when it’s covered in feathers.”

— Alan Bradley

47. “There was no way out; not, at least, in this direction. I was like a hamster that had climbed to the top of the ladder in its cage and found there was nowhere to go but down. But surely hamsters knew in their hamster hearts that escape was futile; it was only we humans who were incapable of accepting our own helplessness.”

— Alan Bradley

48. “Feigning stupidity was one of my specialties. If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.”

— Alan Bradley

49. “If stupidity were theoretical physics, then I would be Albert Einstein.”

— Alan Bradley

50. “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 began to realize why librarians were sometimes able to achieve such pinnacle levels of crankiness: It’s because they’re in agony.”

— Alan Bradley