307 Quotes by Alan Bradley

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.

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

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.

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.

You never know what you’re getting into when you stick your nose in other people’s rubbish.

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

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.

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!

It is always better, and far more rewarding, I have observed, to have someone else feel sorry for you, than to do the job yourself.