Alan Bradley Quotes

A long hallway, hung profusely with dark, water-stained sporting prints, served as a lobby, in which centuries of sacrificed kippers had left the smell of their smoky souls clinging to the wallpaper. Only the patch of sunshine visible through the open front door relieved the gloom.

 It takes all three of them to make a blinding blizzard— or a thunderstorm, for that matter … or a puffy white cloud in a summer sky. O Lord, how manifold are thy works!

But getting back to my old friend water, the thing of it is this: No matter how hot or how cold, no matter its state, its form, its qualities, or its color, each molecule of water still consists of no more than a single oxygen atom bonded to two sister atoms of hydrogen.

Not even the thought of the marvelous chemical change that forms the stuff—the milk’s proteins churned and ripped apart by the heat of boiling then reassembling themselves as they cool into a jellied skin—was enough to console me. I would rather eat a cobweb.

 There are not many things that I despise but chiefest among them is skin on milk. I loathe it with a passion.

I was gazing at a cup of cocoa on my night table. As I focused on the thick brown skin that had formed upon its surface like ice on a muddy pond something at the root of my tongue leapt like a little goat and my stomach turned over.

And I realized not without a sinking feeling that he was already completely in Feely’s thrall, hanging on her every word like ball on a rubber string, nodding like a demented woodpecker, and grinning like a fool.

If God meant for pictures to be sent through the air He’d have never would have given us cinema. Or the national gallery.

Not to be too dramatic about it, that night I slept the sleep of the damned. I dreamt of turrets and craggy ledges where the windswept rain blew in from the ocean with the odor of violets.

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

How I longed to tell her about Harriet–but somehow I could not. The grief in the room belonged to Porcelain and I realized, almost at once, that it would be selfish to rob her of it in any way.

If there is anything more delicious than a sausage roasted over an open Bunsen burner, I can’t image what it might be–Porcelain and I tore into our food like cannibals after a missionary famine.

For all practical purposes, Feely’s enthusiasms stopped where her skin ended.

A great steel octopus of a thing with the temperment of a scorpoin.

The word “actually,” like its cousin “frankly,” should, by itself, be a tip-off to most people that what is to follow is a blatant lie— but it isn’t.