"If you remember nothing else, remember this: Inspiration from outside one's self is like the heat in an oven. It makes passable Bath buns. But inspiration from within is like a volcano: It changes the..."
- Alan Bradley
"Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend."
"I am often thought of as being remarkably bright, and yet my brains, more often than not, are busily devising new and interesting ways of bringing my enemies to sudden, gagging, writhing, agonizing de..."
"I have no fear of the dead. Indeed in my own limited experience I have found them to produce in me a feeling that is quite the opposite of fear. A dead body is much more fascinating than a live one an..."
"What intrigued me more than anything else was finding out the way in which everything, all of creation - all of it! - was held together by invisible chemical bonds, and I found a strange, inexplicable..."
"But when oxidation nibbles more slowly - more delicately, like a tortoise - at the world around us, without a flame, we call it rust and we sometimes scarcely notice as it goes about its business cons..."
"Books are like oxygen to a deep-sea diver," she had once said. "Take them away and you might as well begin counting the bubbles."
"Books make the soul float."
"Dreamless nights, I knew, can be the most troubling, since you come back not knowing where you've been or what you've done."
"Cheese!" I exclaimed. It was a secret prayer, whose meaning was known only to God and to me."