Quotes from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“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.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Although it is pleasant to think about poison at any season, there is something special about Christmas, and I found myself grinning.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“I lay for a long time in silence, staring at the ceiling. Was my life always to be like this? I wondered. Was it going to go, forever, in an instant, from sunshine to shadow? From pandemonium to loneliness? From fierce anger to a fiercer kind of love?”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“I had concocted the gunpowder myself from niter, sulfur, charcoal, and a happy heart. When working with explosives, I've found that attitude is everything.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“I had learned by personal experience that grumblers are deaf to any voices but their own.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“I realized at once that a great actress can never be greater than when she's starring in her own life.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Either way, the whole thing was a pain in the porpoise.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“The sweater didn't fit me, of course. Even with the sleeves rolled up I looked like a baggy monkey picking bananas. But to my way of thinking, at least in winter, woolly warmth trumps freezing fashion any day of the week.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Excuse me,' I said. 'I've just remembered something.' It was true. What I'd remembered was this: While I was not in the least afraid of the dead, there were those among the living who gave me the creeping hooly-goolies...”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Yaroo!" I shouted, and I didn't give a beetle's bottom who heard me. "Ya-rooo!”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Impertinent children ought to be given six coats of shellac and set up in public places as a warning to others.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“I was halfway up the stairs when the doorbell rang. "Dash it all!" I said. There was nothing I hated more than being interrupted when I was about to do something gratifying with chemicals.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“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. 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!”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Perhaps, I thought, whenever we began to breathe the breath of others, when the spinning atoms of their bodies began to mingle withour own, we took on something of their personality, like crystals in a snowflake. Perhaps we became something more, yet something lesser than ourselves.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Do What?'
'Lie,' he said. 'Why do you fabricate these outlandish stories?'
'Well,' I wanted to say, 'there are those of us who create because all around us, things visible and invisible are crumbling. We are like the stonemasons of Babylon, forever working, as it says in Jeremiah, to shore up the city of walls.'
I didn't say that, of course. What I did say was: 'I don't know.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Good morning, Flavia," she said at last, but her acknowledgment of my presence came too late for my liking.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Older sisters are much alike the world over: half a cup of love and half one of contempt.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Ladies and gentlemen, friends and neighbors, and anyone else I've managed to leave out–”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Was my life always to be like this? I wondered.Was it going to go, forever, in an instant, from sunshine to shadow? From pandemonium to loneliness? From fierce anger to a fiercer kind of love?
Something was missing. I was sure of it. Something was missing, but I couldn't for the life of me think what it was.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Theater, I suppose, is a form of mass mesmerism, and if that’s the case, Shakespeare, despite his chemical shortcomings, was surely one of the greatest hypnotists who ever lived.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“Think of the billions of trillions of snowflakes, and the billions of trillions of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in every single one of them. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it, who wrote the laws for the wind and the rain, the snow and the dew? I’ve tried to work it out, but it makes my head spin.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“The vicar's organized a snow-shoveling party."
"But why?" I asked.
It didn't make sense. If all the roads were closed, what use was it clearing a way to the front door?
"Because," said Aunt Felicity's voice behind me, "it is a well-known fact that more than two men shut up together in an enclosed space for more than an hour constitute a hazard to society. If unpleasantness is to be avoided, they must be made to go outdoors and work off their animal spirits.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

“I was being resisted by millions of tiny crystals, I knew, but the strength of their chemical bonds was enormous. If all of us could be like snow, I thought, how happy we should be.”
― Alan Bradley, quote from I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

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“That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
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(Sonnet 73 (1609))”
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