John Carey > Quotes

“Book-burners try to destroy ideas that differ from their own. Reading does the opposite. It encourages doubt... reading releases you from the limits of yourself.”
― John Carey

“...literature gives you ideas to think with. It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the materials for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning, and self-questioning.”
― John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?

“The greatest hindrance to growth in faith is comfortable living.”
― John Carey

“My interview was mostly conducted by Hugo Dyson, an Oxford ‘character’, known for his wit. I always found him alarming. He was like a hyperactive gnome, and stumped around on a walking stick which, when he was seized by one of his paroxysms of laughter, he would beat up and down as if trying to drive it through the floor. It brought to mind Rumpelstiltskin driving his leg into the ground in the fairy tale. He had been one of the ‘Inklings’ – the group of dons, including Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, who met during the 1930s in the Bird and Baby pub opposite St John’s. It was he and Tolkien who, one summer night in 1931, had converted Lewis to Christianity during a stroll along Addison’s Walk. So he was, at least in part, responsible for the Narnia books. I never asked him if he liked them. But it was well known that Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings was not to his taste. Tolkien had been in the habit of favouring the Inklings with readings from it, but one day Dyson, driven to exasperation, interjected, ‘Oh not another fucking elf!’ and after that the readings stopped. On”
― John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books

“Dickens' plots are his most discardable properties, and often have to be pushed aside to let the strange poetry of his imagination emerge.”
― John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Imagination

“One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.”
― John Carey

“Dickens' hypocrites are the prime beneficiaries of his inventive genius. The heroes and heroines have no imagination. We could scrap all the solemn parts of his novels without impairing his status as a writer. But we could not remove Mrs. Gamp or Pecksniff or Bounderby without maiming him irreparably.”
― John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens' Imagination

“Almost everything about bees is amazing. Worker bees fly up to three miles from the hive and visit ten thousand flowers in a day. Their wings beat two hundred times a second, and they perform elaborate dances on the face of the comb to tell other workers where and how far away food sources are. In summer there are fifty thousand of them in the hive, and each dies of exhaustion after about five weeks. In its whole lifetime a worker collects about a quarter of an ounce of honey, less than half a teaspoonful, but the yield from one hive in a good year can be over eighty pounds.”
― John Carey, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books

“Lewis was also disturbed by the mobility which the masses were displaying, abetted by increasing leisure and access to travel. He saw that global tourism would become an increasingly urgent problem as world populations increased. People moved ‘in great herds’ to the seaside, only to find that a sea of people rather than of water awaited them. It was exhausting, and they did not enjoy it. If a travel permit were required before tickets could be bought, much congestion and wear and tear on the roads would be avoided. Most people are ‘born molluscs’ and would be much happier staying at home. Mass tourism is, in any case, an ‘absurdity’, since only scholars are really interested in cathedrals and artworks. The tourists who gawp at them are filled with boredom and self-reproach, and would never, Lewis contends, have dreamed of such a pastime had not holiday advertisements contrived to turn them into sham students and fake cosmopolitan aristocrats.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

“The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand – and this is what they did. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as modernism. In other European countries it was given different names, but the ingredients were essentially similar, and they revolutionized the visual arts as well as literature. Realism of the sort that it was assumed the masses appreciated was abandoned. So was logical coherence. Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

“Sometimes we hear pronouncements from scientists who confidently state that everything worth knowing will soon be known – or even is already known – and who paint pictures of a Dionysian or Polynesian age in which the zest for intellectual discovery has withered, to be replaced by a kind of subdued languor, the lotus eaters drinking fermented coconut milk or some other mild hallucinogen. In addition to maligning both the Polynesians, who were intrepid explorers (and whose brief respite in paradise is now sadly ending ), as well as the inducements to intellectual discovery provided by some hallucinogens, this contention turns out to be trivially mistaken.

__Carl Sagan”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“For some male intellectuals, a regrettable aspect of popular newspapers was that they encouraged women. In the Nietzschean tradition the emancipation and education of women were signs of modern shallowness. The man who has depth, Nietzsche pronounces, can think of women only in an ‘oriental way’. Thus Spake Zarathustra contains the famous advice ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip.’18 Northcliffe, by contrast, started a new trend among newspaper proprietors by considering women readers worthy of attention. In 1891 he launched a cheap illustrated women’s weekly, Forget-Me-Not, which achieved a circulation of over 140,000 in three years, and paved the way for the highly successful Home Chat. He also insisted on two columns of articles devoted to women’s concerns in the Daily Mail.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

“Man’s view of the gorilla illustrates in a dramatic way the change from slaughter to conservation that distinguishes modern attitudes to wildlife. To nineteenth-century explorers and naturalists gorillas were evil.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“For the primary function of culture in Gissing’s scheme of things was to segregate him from other people. To qualify as culture, knowledge had to be abstruse.”
― John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880-1939

“For instance, Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest, and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress untold centuries of development into nine months before he was human enough to break loose as an independent being.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Without doubt the Pterodactyl attracted great attention, for even the least observant could see that there was the making of a bird in him. And so it turned out. Also the makings of a mammal, in time. One thing we have to say to his credit, that in the matter of picturesqueness he was the triumph of his Period; he wore wings and had teeth, and was a starchy and wonderful mixture altogether , a kind of long-distance premonitory symptom of Kipling’s marine:

’E isn’t one o’ the reg’lar Line, nor ’e isn’t one of the crew,
’E’s a kind of a giddy harumfrodite – soldier an’ sailor too!
Alfred Russel Wallace”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War 1. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry, which requires more than 10 bits of information to understand.
Carl Sagan”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“love is presented as a civilising force, something that is needed to make you fully human.”
― John Carey

“For those who have trouble with a telephone number or with a name to fit a face, it is even problematical contemplating the gap between us and them, the normal and the genius. Someone once asked A. C. Aitken, professor at Edinburgh University, to make 4 divided by 47 into a decimal. After four seconds he started and gave another digit every three-quarters of a second: ‘point 08510638297872340425531914’. He stopped (after twenty-four seconds), discussed the problem for one minute, and then restarted: ‘191489’– five-second pause –‘361702127659574468 . Now that’s the repeating point. It starts again with 085. So if that’s forty-six places, I’m right.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“By 1853 New York alone had 86 studios. The enormous demand for family pictures was due partly to the high nineteenth-century mortality rates, especially among children.

"Secure the shadow ere the substance fade,
Let Nature imitate what Nature made,"

ran the advertising slogan.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look, like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent.

George Orwell, cited by John Carey”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“The most remarkable of these (fossils) are teeth, wonderfully polished in the heart of their rough veinstone, bright with enamel as though still in a fresh state. Some of them are most formidable, triangular, finely jagged at the edges, almost as large as one’s hand. What an insatiable abyss, a jaw armed with such a set of teeth in manifold rows, placed stepwise almost to the back of the gullet; what mouthfuls, snapped up and lacerated by those serrate shears! You are seized with a shiver merely at the imaginary reconstruction of that awful implement of destruction!

The monster thus equipped as a prince of death belonged to the order of Squalidæ. Paleontology calls him Carcharodon Megalodon . The shark of to-day, the terror of the seas, gives an approximate idea of him, in so far as the dwarf can give an idea of the giant.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“Thomas Malthus (1766– 1834), mathematician and clergyman, published his Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798 , arousing a storm of abuse and controversy. By applying scientific thought to the question of population, which no one had done before, he contrived to show that it was impossible – despite the dreams of Utopian philosophers – for the whole of mankind to live in happiness and plenty.”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science

“A nobler colour than all these – the noblest colour ever seen on this earth – one which belongs to a strength greater than that of the Egyptian granite, and to a beauty greater than that of the sunset or the rose – is still mysteriously connected with the presence of this dark iron. I believe it is not ascertained on what the crimson of blood actually depends; but the colour is connected, of course, with its vitality, and that vitality with the existence of iron as one of its substantial elements. Is it not strange to find this stern and strong metal mingled so delicately in our human life that we cannot even blush without its help?
John Ruskin "The Two Paths”
― John Carey, The Faber Book of Science