Richard Farr > Quotes

“You poor things. You think that learning is remembering. No wonder you find it so dull. Real learning is hunting for the truth.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver

“like all mathematicians, I think there must be something else, powerful and ghostly and unseen, that lies beneath the surface of the physical world. Numbers are just one of several things that don’t make sense otherwise. Your father studies the painting. And that’s fine. But I’m interested in the canvas under the paint.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Just how much does life suck when you're half-mad with longing for someone, and they have no idea and never will, and you deal with that by insulting them?”
― Richard Farr, Ghosts in the Machine

“Americans call it a cell. A small locked room from which you can’t escape! We Brits call it a mobile—a colorful toy you suspend over a drooling infant’s crib.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“How, after all, are we so sure there aren't invisible civilizations floating by on every mote?”
― Richard Farr

“That night I make my special pasta carbonara. You fry fresh rosemary in olive oil, with a pinch of salt and insane amounts of finely chopped garlic. Add a little chopped pancetta, then make the sauce by adding a pint of whole milk and curdling it with a tablespoon of vinegar. Boil it down for ten minutes, and mix in a couple of beaten eggs right at the end. Sprinkle on some finely shaved fresh parmesan—never the pre-grated stuff—and coarsely ground black pepper. Good stuff. When I ask Dad the significance of Nineveh, he’s so excited that he can’t stop talking even with long thin worms of sauce-flecked spaghettini burrowing greedily into his mouth. “Ashurbanipal. Assyrian”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“For Aidan and Declan   A father may be forgiven, perhaps, for wishing upon his sons the richest, most dazzling, most extravagant success of all—a life well lived.   So, like, no pressure or anything.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“He understands that the ‘childish things’ are not really things; not objects. Saint Paul is not talking about what you do with the toys you have outgrown. He is talking about your character. Put away. Put away. The irony is horrible. The suggestion, being offered with the usual mix of piety and end-of-term bonhomie, is that you should take the innocent child in your hands and murder it. Stuff the body into a cupboard. Lock the door. Is this what they expect of you now? James feels a savage loyalty to himself. He imagines now how he will kick and fight to prevent them from putting him away and replacing him with something else.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver

“He has the common weakness of fathers—he wants to feel close to me, wants to understand me, and wants the easy road to that result, which is me being more like him than I am.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“If this is real, then everything we thought we knew about human civilization—the origin of cities, religion, language itself—it’s just frost on the windowpane.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Genesis, chapter eleven. We came down, into the plain of Shinar, and said, ‘Hot damn, let’s show off how clever we are!’ So we built ourselves a fine city, and put a bodacious skyscraper in the middle. And yea verily, we did the whole thing in mirrored glass, and installed high-speed elevators, and AC, and an underground garage with valet parking.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“He lives at Twitnam and is a freind of Mr Pope, a circumstance wch inclines me against him.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver

“He was the sort of don whose fondest dream is a student both intelligent enough and spineless enough to write three hundred pages on the significance of the blank page in Tristram Shandy.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver

“What I’m actually craving is tea—specifically, the British blend Mom gave me a taste for. Wickedly strong black Assam, steeped in boiling water for five full minutes”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“So when did consciousness show up? Where did it come from? What is it? And how is it possible?”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“The best part of assembling this pack was discovering how many smart nonfiction writers—people actually investigating what’s true—committed the foolish error of leaving all their best ideas just lying around in books, from where I could easily steal them.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Always hang onto the possibility that what has appeared to you as the truth is its exact opposite.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver

“recall Rosko, hunched over a bowl of Vietnamese noodles, saying, “That’s the big puzzle. Why is pain, you know, painful?”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Simple. If you can’t make sense of something—if it seems to lie beyond your understanding—then you’ve nothing but bad reasons for claiming that you ‘know’ it’s supernatural. On the other hand, if eventually you do make sense of it, bingo: the temptation to call it supernatural evaporates. History of science in a nutshell.”
― Richard Farr, Ghosts in the Machine

“He is talking almost sunnily about manners and friendship, love and service, goodwill and generosity and forgiveness—everything, in fact, a salad bar of crisp Christian virtues, healthy and cleansing, something to be carried away from school to sustain one in the wider world, the moral equivalent of that packed lunch.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver

“And the amazing twist is that, like all abused and abandoned children, we’re convinced the whole thing’s our fault!” “I think—” “Spooky, isn’t it, the way some of those ideas keep on coming up all over the world in different forms?”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Don’t be arrogant. Don’t assume the big surprises are all behind us.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“I figure out right away that people think they know what grief is, even if they’ve never really experienced it.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“You know, sometimes evidence is puzzling. But being puzzled is a bad reason to run around shrieking with your hands in the air, like frightened children. It’s also a bad reason for surrendering your judgment to someone whose main claim to expertise is that he wears funny clothes and stares out of the window a lot.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Babel’s a story about parenting gone wrong, isn’t it? Actually, I think religion’s a story about parenting gone wrong. The gods create us, protect us, then try to keep us amused with cool toys like reason and language. But”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“pasta carbonara. You fry fresh rosemary in olive oil, with a pinch of salt and insane amounts of finely chopped garlic. Add a little chopped pancetta, then make the sauce by adding a pint of whole milk and curdling it with a tablespoon of vinegar. Boil it down for ten minutes, and mix in a couple of beaten eggs right at the end. Sprinkle on some finely shaved fresh parmesan—never the pre-grated stuff—and coarsely ground black pepper.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“We became arrogant, and built this great tower, and the Creator was so cheesed off with us that he said, ‘Right, that’s it, I’m done. Screw you!’ So he destroyed the tower and put the angelic language through the shredder.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“James fantasised about marrying this woman, and being a scholar, and leaving her at home while he went out into the world in a longship to hunt down the fierce but nourishing Truth.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver

“But it’s the same story over and over, in more cultures than you can count. God meets girl. Every single time, the result is crazy sex and a child who’s a half-divine miracle-worker. We tend to forget that it’s the Christian story too.” “Except in Christianity they skip the sex.”
― Richard Farr, The Fire Seekers

“Somehow these biblical figures roam about all over the desert, and the Bible is annoyingly thin on how they eat and drink, whether they carry moleskin and loo paper and a Primus to cook on, that sort of thing.”
― Richard Farr, The Truth About Constance Weaver