307 Quotes by Alan Bradley

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.

People who have been offended are entitled to a short sulk, as long as it doesn’t drag on too long.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

Older sisters are much alike the world over: half a cup of love and half one of contempt.