Tom Cox > Quotes

“Churchill and Roosevelt loved cats. Hitler and Napoleon hated them. That was a vastly reductive view on the matter, obviously, but it told you a lot.”
― Tom Cox

“Where did the moor start? That's a highly debatable question. Where does the true north start? Where do moths end and butterflies begin? Where is the border between 'sometimes fancies members of the opposite sex but doesn't actually want to touch their sexual organs' and 'is definitely gay'? Who decides what's soulful funk and what's funky soul? There's always some hard-bitten unimpressable bastard who'll tell you, when you're on the moor, that you're not on the proper moor, no matter how far into the moor you are. But let's not piss about. This - whether or not it's 'technically' on the moor, as the map defines it - is a moorland village. You know, very firmly when you're in it, that you're not in London, or Kettering, or Ipswich. You're in Underhill. As you pass from the high ground down that funnel, so exquisitely depicted by Joyce, the air of the uplands remains in your nostrils, the trees have beards, the lanes have ferny green sideburns, and your hair is made of rain. It's the bloody moor, you pedantic bastards.”
― Tom Cox

“Permission to drink freely from the well of life - and the upstairs loo”
― Tom Cox

“The whole world is there on the screen, for the taking, and a hive of demanding voices encourages us to absorb as much of it as possible, and keep up with it frantically, as it moves on, and it is always moving on, more swiftly and forgetfully than ever. If you're someone with a thirst for knowledge, you can very easily get sucked into the excitement of this, before you realise it's a flawed, impossible pursuit, and it's not making people, en mass, any more knowledgeable. What it instead often leads to is a brand of knowledge that's thousands of miles wide and half a centimetre deep: a pond-skating mentality of misleading screenshots and thinly gleaned opinions and out-of-context sound bites and people reading hastily between the lines while forgetting the vital thing you also need to do when practising that skill is to read the lines themselves. The idea of getting to know an area of limited size extremely well works as an antidote to this, and even in a very small area there is always more to know.”
― Tom Cox, 21st Century Yokel

“This place – this part of the Peak District – has its own particular winter smell. It followed me on a walk today: a very long one.”
― Tom Cox, Help the Witch