Top 200 Alan Bradley Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “You can learn from a glance at anyone’s library, not what they are, but what they wish to be.”

— Alan Bradley

152. “One could always be helpful, I reminded myself, without spilling one’s guts.”

— Alan Bradley

153. “How can I help?” I asked, as Anglicans have been taught to do – and in spite of the fact that our family have been Roman Catholics since St. Peter was a sailor.”

— Alan Bradley

154. “Poise was keeping your knees and your lips together, your eyebrows and your nostrils apart.”

— Alan Bradley

155. “The more I dealt with adults, the less I wanted to be one.”

— Alan Bradley

156. “Simple pleasures are best.”

— Alan Bradley

157. “I did not elaborate, nor did I need to. The human imagination is capable of anything when left on its own to fill in the blanks.”

— Alan Bradley

158. “I found myself wondering if, by whistling about whistling while you work while you were actually working, you would cause some odd bit of the universe, in some unknown dimension, to fold in upon itself – rather like a Klein bottle, which has no inside or outside – causing you to disappear up your own posterior in a cloud of probably invisible orange smoke.”

— Alan Bradley

159. “There is always something vaguely unsettling about being alone in an empty building that is not your own. It is as if, whenever present inhabitants are away, the phantoms of former owners come shimmering out of the woodwork to protect their territory. Although you cannot see these ghosts, you can certainly feel their unwelcoming presence, and sometimes even smell them: a sort of shivering in the air that tells you that you’re not alone and not wanted.”

— Alan Bradley

160. “True charity, I had discovered, consists in swallowing an invisible flaming sword.”

— Alan Bradley

161. “Like it or not, there are times when you need to be alone; times when you need to be lonely; times when you need to need other people.”

— Alan Bradley

162. “As I had been forced to learn at a very young age, there’s no better way to mask a lie – or at least a glaring omission – than to wrap it in an emotional outpouring of truth.”

— Alan Bradley

163. “It’s astonishing what the human heart will do to make allegiances. Loneliness is a kind of glue that can bind us to the most unlikely strangers.”

— Alan Bradley

164. “Let’s go have a look at those first edition Pickwick Papers I promised to show you. You’ll find Dickens’s signature especially suggestive. It’s in green ink on the title page of each number.” “Nineteen signatures of the divine Dickens,” Helmut marveled. “Remarkable. Lead on, dear Daphne.”

— Alan Bradley

165. “I’m very sorry about your mother, Flavia. I can’t even begin to imagine how you must feel.” At least the man had the sense to admit it.”

— Alan Bradley

166. “I have to admit, though, that Cynthia was a great organizer, but then, so were the men with whips who got the pyramids built.”

— Alan Bradley

167. “Saint Paul on the road to Damascus might have pleaded sunstroke, for example, and the world would have been a different place.”

— Alan Bradley

168. “Even in complete silence, Buckshaw had its own unique silence; a silence I would recognize anywhere.”

— Alan Bradley

169. “Whenever I’m a little blue I think about cyanide, whose color so perfectly reflects my mood. It is pleasant to think that the manioc plant, which grows in Brazil, contains enormous quantities of the stuff in its thirty-pound roots, all of which, unfortunately, is washed away before the residue is used to make our daily tapioca.”

— Alan Bradley

170. “A church is a wonderful place for a wedding, surrounded as it is by the legions of the dead, whose listening bones bear silent witness to every promise made – and broken – at the altar. Dead now, every last one of them, including the man who invented the rule about not putting your elbows on the dinner table.”

— Alan Bradley

171. “I threw my hands up into the air and launched myself into a series of exuberant triple cartwheels. “Yaroo!” I shouted.”

— Alan Bradley

172. “I reached out and touched his hands and they stilled at once. I had observed – although I did not often make use of the fact – that there were times when a touch could say things that words could not.”

— Alan Bradley

173. “Experience has taught me that an expected answer is often better than the truth.”

— Alan Bradley

174. “I have always found there to be a certain sadness about mirrors, since they double the space in a house which needs to be filled with love.”

— Alan Bradley

175. “It’s amazing what the discovery of a corpse can do for one’s spirits.”

— Alan Bradley

176. “I want to know who I am before it is too late – before I am no longer the same person – before I become someone different. Although there are days when this seems a furious race against time, there are others when it seems to matter not a tinker’s curse.”

— Alan Bradley

177. “O, how I wish I could have conducted a chemical analysis on the look Inspector Hewitt gave me! It was composed of equal parts skepticism, outrage, acceptance, gratitude, relief, and surrender. I had never seen anything quite like it.”

— Alan Bradley

178. “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. False feelings are allowed to clog the works like raw honey poured into the tiny wheels of a fine timepiece.”

— Alan Bradley

179. “The place smelled of commodes and playing cards, and before I was halfway to the end I had made a firm resolve never to begin to die. For me it would be all or nothing: no half measures, no lingering on the doorstep.”

— Alan Bradley

180. “As I am now, so you must be, So Friend, prepare to follow me.”

— Alan Bradley

181. “We always want to love the recipients of our charity,” the doctor said, negotiating a sharp bend in the road with a surprising demonstration of steering skill, “but it is not necessary. Indeed, it is sometimes not possible.”

— Alan Bradley

182. “Liberals have always been the most fervent Imperialists.”

— Alan Bradley

183. “I must be honest about the fact that I’m made extremely uneasy by excessive noise, and that I do not care for shouted instructions. If I’d been meant to be a sheep, I reasoned, I’d have been born with wool instead of skin.”

— Alan Bradley

184. “Books make the soul float.”

— Alan Bradley

185. “The soul, Daffy says, is not necessarily where the heart is.”

— Alan Bradley

186. “Seed biscuits and milk! I hated Mrs. Mullet’s seed biscuits the way Saint Paul hated sin. Perhaps even more so. I wanted to clamber up onto the table, and with a sausage on the end of a fork as my scepter, shout in my best Laurence Olivier voice, ‘Will no one rid us of this turbulent pastry cook?”

— Alan Bradley

187. “Although I was amused at the mad scientist’s idea of injecting a powerful bleach to render himself invisible, what truly shocked me was the way he treated his laboratory equipment. “It’s just a fill-um, dear,” Mrs. Mullet said, as I gripped her arm during the smashing of the glassware.”

— Alan Bradley

188. “It’s all so complicated,” she said again. “All so infernally complicated.” “It’s about money, isn’t it?” I asked. This was no great leap of deduction. All great problems, when whittled down to their root, were about money. No matter how tangled they seemed on the surface, the bottom was always banknotes.”

— Alan Bradley

189. “Dogger had once warned me to be wary of any man who introduced himself as ‘Mr.’ It was an honorific, he said, a mark of respect to be bestowed by others, but never, ever, under any circumstances, upon oneself.”

— Alan Bradley

190. “Girl be blowed!” I snapped. “I’m here as a brain, not as a female.”

— Alan Bradley

191. “People who turn pages with licked fingers are as bad as those who wipe their noses on the table linen.”

— Alan Bradley

192. “The love between animal and human is one that never fails, as it does so often among our own sorry tribe.”

— Alan Bradley

193. “His was a kind of gentleness which, I think, cannot be learned and cannot be taught.”

— Alan Bradley

194. “You can pray in the churchyard,” the sergeant said. “The Lord has large ears.”

— Alan Bradley

195. “Eleven-year-olds are supposed to be unreliable. We’re past the age of being poppets: the age where people bend over and poke us in the tum with their fingers and make idiotic noises that sound like “boof-boof” – just the thought of which is enough to make me bring up my Bovril. And yet we’re still not at the age where anyone ever mistakes us for a grown-up. The fact is, we’re invisible – except when we choose not to be.”

— Alan Bradley

196. “You lie like one of us.”

— Alan Bradley

197. “There are times when eyebrows speak louder than words.”

— Alan Bradley

198. “It was as black in the closet as old blood.”

— Alan Bradley

199. “Boy Scouts were famous from pole to pole as being able to whittle up, upon demand, anything from a toothpick to a cantilever bridge.”

— Alan Bradley

200. “Nobody ever simply dies.”

— Alan Bradley