Oliver Tearle > Quotes

“Big Brother is very much watching everyone in More’s imagined world: there’s no personal liberty, that great human right that is placed under threat in virtually every modern dystopian novel from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Yet More doesn’t seem to think this presents a problem.”
― Oliver Tearle, The Secret Library: A Book Lover's Journey Through Curiosities of Literature

“He was an important figure in the development of English prose, too. Many words still in common use are first recorded in Elyot’s writing, including abusive, adapt, adult, boyish, concoction, encyclopedia, excrement, fragment, inimitable, involuntary, loyal, ode, perfume, ridiculous, spearmint, starfish, tension, tolerate and – rather splendidly – turnip. He also provides the first recorded use of the word ‘alligator’, but in the sense of ‘one who binds or ties something’ (it would only first be applied to the reptile fifty years later, in the 1590s). In 1538 he produced the first-ever Latin–English dictionary.”
― Oliver Tearle, The Secret Library: A Book Lover's Journey Through Curiosities of Literature

“Maybe our paths will cross
when this universe folds in and makes another.
Maybe, at the point

when all that is, and all that’s ever been,
collapses into everything else and is remade,
our paths will cross, however briefly, and

our terminus become a junction.
It may be a long shot. I will take it
and hope and trust our paths will cross again.”
― Oliver Tearle