Top 200 Alan Bradley Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.”

— Alan Bradley

52. “The possibilities seemed endless, which made it all the more exciting, since possibilities are so much more thrilling than certainties – or so I’ve always thought.”

— Alan Bradley

53. “It is not the dead who are to be feared, I thought, but rather the living. Only the living can cast you down among the dead.”

— Alan Bradley

54. “Was he being what Daffy called “ironical”? She had once told me that the word meant the use of veiled sarcasm: the dagger under the silk. “The smiler with the knife!” she had hissed in a horrible voice.”

— Alan Bradley

55. “The first step in gaining the upper hand is always to seize the moral high ground, and to be able to do this with no more than a single word is nothing short of genius.”

— Alan Bradley

56. “During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people’s creations.”

— Alan Bradley

57. “I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets. A pale woman in Elizabethan dress stood beside my bed and whispered in my ear that the bells would ring. An old salt in an oilcloth jacket sat atop a piling, mending nets with an awl, while far out at sea a tiny aeroplane winged its way towards the setting sun.”

— Alan Bradley

58. “We were all of us like the proverbial ships that pass in the night, signaling only briefly to one another before sailing off over the horizon into our own patch of darkness.”

— Alan Bradley

59. “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

60. “There are, in fact, no halos in the Bible – just as there are no cats or accordions.”

— Alan Bradley

61. “A boy is content to be made into a civil man by caning, or any one of a number of other stratagems, but a girl, being disqualified by Nature, as it were, from such physical brutality, must remain forever something of a terra incognita. Don’t you think?”

— Alan Bradley

62. “I’m at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.”

— Alan Bradley

63. “I could have gone either north or south but decided to strike off north because it was my favorite direction.”

— Alan Bradley

64. “Mediocrity, I discovered, was the great camouflage; the great protective coloring. Those boys who did not fail, yet did not excel, were left alone, free of the demands of the master who might wish to groom them for glory and of the school bully who might make them his scapegoat.”

— Alan Bradley

65. “There are choices in life which you are aware, even as you make them, cannot be undone; choices after which, once made, things will never the the same.”

— Alan Bradley

66. “Everyone else in the world is sorry. Dare to be something more than that.”

— Alan Bradley

67. “It is the hallmark of the beast in us,” Dogger continued, “which requires a modicum of truth in our transgressions, no matter how finely distilled; no matter how thinly diluted.”

— Alan Bradley

68. “Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.”

— Alan Bradley

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

— Alan Bradley

70. “TV and film taught me to think cinematically. Teaching others to edit, for example, provides a great deal of insight into the millions of ways in which given elements can be put together to tell a story.”

— Alan Bradley

71. “This was an interesting thought; it had never occurred to me that one’s name could be a compass.”

— Alan Bradley

72. “How could I possibly learn to survive in such a pagan place, where trams were streetcars, vans and lorries were trucks, pavements were sidewalks, jumpers were sweaters, petrol was gasoline, aluminium was aluminum, sweets were candy, a full stop was a period, and cheerio was goodbye?”

— Alan Bradley

73. “What are we going to do, Dogger?” It seemed a reasonable question. After all he had been through, surely Dogger knew something of hopeless situations. “We shall wait upon tomorrow,” he said. “But – what if tomorrow is worse than today?” “Then we shall wait upon the day after tomorrow.” “And so forth?” I asked. “And so forth,” Dogger said.”

— Alan Bradley

74. “It was the chemistry that caused this lifting of the spirits. Chemistry lifted you up out of the mud and flung you up among the stars.”

— Alan Bradley

75. “It is no longer enough simply to solve crimes: We modern private detectives must also be able to come up with catchy names for our cases.”

— Alan Bradley

76. “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

77. “To my mind, if Nature had wanted us to have bright red fingertips, She would have caused us to be born with our blood on the outside.”

— Alan Bradley

78. “I don’t care’ is the last bit of baggage to be tossed overboard in a losing argument.”

— Alan Bradley

79. “The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.”

— Alan Bradley

80. “Motherhood could be a grim old business, I decided, and one that could never, really, be shared. In spite of her gentle exterior, there was a part of the Inspector’s wife that was forever beyond knowing. Perhaps it was like that with all mothers. I.”

— Alan Bradley

81. “Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that’s the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hypnotists who ever lived.”

— Alan Bradley

82. “It always surprises me after a family row to find that the world outdoors has remained the same. While the passions and feelings that accumulate like noxious gases inside a house seem to condense and cling to the walls and ceilings like old smoke the out-of-doors is different. The landscape seems incapable of accumulating human radiation. Perhaps the wind blows anger away.”

— Alan Bradley

83. “I shot him a broad smile, a smile wide enough to present him with a good view of the wire braces that caged my teeth. Although they gave me the look of a dirigible with the skin off, Father always liked being reminded that he was getting his money’s worth.”

— Alan Bradley

84. “Even the most foul of us likes to believe we have a saving grace.”

— Alan Bradley

85. “I was an early reader, and my grandmother, who as a child had been forbidden to read by a father who believed books to be frivolous time-wasters, delighted in putting her favorite volumes into her grandchildren’s hands.”

— Alan Bradley

86. “There is genuine joy in being alone in the dark inside your own head with no outside distractions, where you can scramble from ledge to rocky ledge, hallooing happily in a vast, echoing cave; climbing hand over hand from ledge to ledge of facts and memories, picking up old gems and new: examining, comparing, putting them down again and reaching for the next.”

— Alan Bradley

87. “Giving someone the benefit of the doubt is not so simple as it sounds. What it means, in fact, is being charitable – which, as the vicar is fond of pointing out, is the most difficult of the graces to master. Faith and hope are a piece of cake but charity is a Pandora’s box: the monster in the cistern which, when the lid is opened, comes swarming out to seize you by the throat.”

— Alan Bradley

88. “Foolishness in a grown man, no matter how lighthearted, is disgusting.”

— Alan Bradley

89. “Although Fate loves coincidences, it does not chew its cabbage twice.”

— Alan Bradley

90. “As anybody with two older sisters can tell you, a closed door is like a red rag to a bull. It cannot go unchallenged.”

— Alan Bradley

91. “There is a certain type of person to whom a closed door is a challenge – a dare, a taunt, a glove thrown down – and I am one of them. A closed door is more than a mystery to be solved: It’s an insult. A slap in the face.”

— Alan Bradley

92. “It has been my experience that facetiousness in the mouth of someone old enough to know better is often no more than camouflage for something far, far worse.”

— Alan Bradley

93. “Die, witch,” I managed, making a cross of my forefingers.”

— Alan Bradley

94. “Memories, I was coming to realize, can be sharper than daggers.”

— Alan Bradley

95. “No sooner was I safely among the gravestones than a great feeling of warmth and calm contentment came sweeping over me. Life among the dead. This was where I was meant to be!”

— Alan Bradley

96. “Lobsters, snails, crabs, clams, squids, slugs, and members of the European royal families, by contrast, have blue blood, due to the fact that it’s based on copper rather than iron.”

— Alan Bradley

97. “Mirages of happiness, I thought. If you walk towards them, they will never grow any closer. Eventually they will vanish into thin air, like the Lady of the Lake.”

— Alan Bradley

98. “As he drank, I remembered that there’s a reason we English are ruled more by tea than by Buckingham Palace or His Majesty’s Government: Apart from the soul, the brewing of tea is the only thing that sets us apart from the great apes – or so the Vicar had remarked to Father...”

— Alan Bradley

99. “O, how I wanted to hug him! O, how I wanted to pour our my affection! But there are times, I was learning, when one must not, on any account, give in to impulse. It was, I suppose, what they mean by the whole idea of “being British”: holding oneself in check for the greater good; substituting the encouraging word for the crushing embrace.”

— Alan Bradley

100. “I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material – something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.”

— Alan Bradley