307 Quotes by Alan Bradley

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.

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.

There are rare and precious moments, when one is a stranger in a room, that one can examine its inhabitants with little or no prejudice. Without knowing so much as their names, it is possible to form an assessment based purely upon observation and instinct.

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

Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn’t think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out.

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.

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

Life’s like that, too,” Aunt Felicity continued. “Too much push, and bang through the bottom one goes. Still, if one doesn’t paddle, one doesn’t get anywhere.

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.