No ... eight days a week. "
"Anyone who knew the word slattern was worth cultivating as a friend."
"Whenever I'm out-of-doors and find myself wanting to have a first-rate think, I fling myself down on my back, throw my arms and legs out so that I look like an asterisk, and gaze at the sky. "
"I found a dead body in the cucumber patch,' I told them.
How very like you,' Ophelia said, and went on preening her eyebrows."
"It is not unknown for fathers with a brace of daughters to reel off their names in order of birth when summoning the youngest, and I had long ago become accustomed to being called 'Ophelia Daphne Flavia, damn it."
"Here we were, Father and I, shut up in a plain little room, and for the first time in my life having something that might pass for a conversation. We were talking to one another almost like adults; almost like one human being to another; almost like father and daughter. And even though I couldn't think of anything to say, I felt myself wanting it to go on and on until the last star blinked out."
"I remembered a piece of sisterly advice, which Feely once gave Daffy and me:
"If ever you're accosted by a man," she'd said, "kick him in the Casanovas and run like blue blazes!"
Although it had sounded at the time like a useful bit of intelligence, the only problem was that I didn't know where the Casanovas were located.
I'd have to think of something else."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
4 people liked it
"I brought to mind the image of the stranger lying there in the first light of dawn: the slight growth of whiskers on his chin, strands of his red hair shifting gently on the faint stirrings of the morning breeze, the pallor, the extended legs, the quivering fingers, that last, sucking breath. And that word, blown into my face ... "Vale."
The thrill of it all!
Yes," I said, "it was devastating."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
tags: imagery 3 people liked it
"If there is a thing I truly despise, it is being addressed as "dearie." When I write my magnum opus, A Treatise Upon All Poison, and come to "Cyanide," I am going to put under "Uses" the phrase "Particularly efficacious in the cure of those who call one 'Dearie."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
tags: humor, poison 3 people liked it
"Simple pleasures are best."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
tags: simple-pleasures 2 people liked it
"...silence is sometimes the most costly of commodities."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
tags: silence 2 people liked it
"Chicken fizz! O Lord, protect all of us who toil in the vineyards of experimental chemistry!"
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
tags: chemistry, humor 2 people liked it
"A peculiar feeling passed over me--or, rather, through me, as if I were an umbrella remembering what it felt like to pop open in the rain.
"
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
2 people liked it
"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?"
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
2 people liked it
"Even in complete silence, Buckshaw had its own unique silence; a silence I would recognize anywhere. "
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
1 person liked it
"What intrigued me more than anything 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 comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was real stability."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
tags: chemical-stability 1 person liked it
"I hoisted the lid off the Spode vegetable dish and, from the depths of its hand-painted butterflies and raspberries, spooned out a generous helping of peas. Using my knife as a ruler and my fork as a prod, I marshaled the peas so that they formed meticulous rows and columns across my plate: rank upon rank of little green spheres, spaced with a precision that would have delighted the heart of the most exacting Swiss watchmaker. Then, beginning at the bottom left, I speared the first pea with my fork and ate it."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
1 person liked it
"What else?"
Nothing," Dogger said. "Just sign it. Kings prefer brevity."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
1 person liked it
"The woman was putting her purse in the drawer and settling down behind the desk, and I realized I had never seen her before in my life. Her face was as wrinkled as one of those forgotten apples you sometimes find in the pocket of last year's winter jacket.
Yes?" she said, peering over her spectacles. They teach them to do that at the Royal Academy of Library Science."
— Alan Bradley (The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie)
tags: librarians 1 person liked it
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