307 Quotes by Alan Bradley

Dieter, you’re a brick!” I shouted. I couldn’t help it. Dieter looked as pleased as punch. To him, being called a brick by an English native was probably more precious than a knighthood.

I had to suppress a smile. Sherlock Holmes once remarked of his brother, Mycroft, that you were as unlikely to find him outside of the Diogenes Club as you were to meet a tramcar coming down a country lane. Like Mycroft, Father had his rails, and he ran on them. Except for church and the occasional short-tempered dash to the train to attend a stamp show, Father seldom, if ever, stuck his nose out-of-doors.

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

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

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.

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.

I sometimes suffer from an excess of zeal.

You are unreliable, Flavia,? he said. ‘Utterly unreliable.’ Of course I was! It was one of the things I loved most about myself.

But what he said was true enough: I had recently destroyed a perfectly good set of wire braces by straightening them to pick a lock. Father had grumbled, of course, but had made another appointment to have me netted and dragged back up to London, to that third-floor ironmonger’s shop in Farringdon Street, where I would be strapped to a board like Boris Karloff as various bits of ironmongery were shoved into my mouth, screwed in, and bolted to my gums.