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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.

Alan Bradley

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Alan Bradley
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: October 10
Novelist
Writer
City of Toronto
Father
Accustomed
Daphne
Order
Fathers
Brace
Become
Unknown
Ophelia
Long
Damn
Reel
Daughter
Summoning
Birth
Braces
Called
Youngest
Names
Daughters

More quotes by Alan Bradley

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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 face of the world.
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My grandmother flew only once in her life, and that was the day she and her new husband ascended into the skies of Victorian London in the wicker basket of a hot-air balloon. They were soon to emigrate to Canada, and the aerial ride was meant to be a last view of their beloved England.
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I was learning that among friends, a smile can be better than a belly laugh.
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During a long career in TV broadcasting, I spent a lot of time contributing to other people's creations.
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I grew up in a very British family who had been transplanted to Canada, and my grandmother's house was filled with English books. I was a very early reader, so I was really brought up being surrounded with piles of British books and British newspapers, British magazines. I developed a really great love of England.
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Not very good with death? Father was a military man, and military men lived with death lived for death lived on death. To a professional soldier, oddly enough, death was life.
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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.
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Whenever I'm with other people, part of me shrinks a little. Only when I am alone can I fully enjoy my own company.
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I'm at that age where I watch such things with two minds, one that cackles at these capers and another that never gets much beyond a rather jaded and self-conscious smile, like the Mona Lisa.
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To be most effective, flattery is always best applied with a trowel.
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The spectrum on the list is very broad. It includes leftists who think that whiny liberals should be stuffed in a sack and drowned.
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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 comfort in knowing that somewhere, even though we couldn't see it in our own world, there was a real stability.
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Liberals have always been the most fervent Imperialists.
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I always knew that I wanted to work on my own material - something that would be more long-lasting than short-lived electronic transmissions.
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Growing up in a Canadian household that was more British than Big Ben, I dreamed of flying to England myself and visiting the places my family never tired of talking about. I always woke up before the plane landed.
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Except I'm aware that as a writer you can't get away with as much writing for children as you can with adults. Children have much more finely tuned senses of justice, morals, and ethics. They are much more Platonic: children are symmetrical, before we begin to fragment them with our own nonsensical ideas and squelch their natural joy in knowledge.
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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.
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I had thought for years, probably 30 or 40 years, that it would be a lot of fun to try my hand at a classic English mystery novel... I love that form very much because the reader is so familiar with all of the types of characters that are in there that they already identify with the book.
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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 death.
Alan Bradley
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Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.
Alan Bradley