Sam Bruskin > Sam's Quotes

“The worl is ful of things waiting to happen. Thats the meat and boan of it right there. You myt think you can jus go here and there doing nothing. Happening nothing. You cant tho you bleeding cant. You put your self on any road and some thing wil show its self to you. Wanting to happen. Waiting to happen. You myt say, 'I dont want to know.' But 1ce its showt its self to you you wil know wont you. You cant not know no mor. There it is and working in you. You myt try to put a farness be twean you and it only you cant becaws youre carrying it inside you. The waiting to happen aint out there where it ben no more its inside you.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“O yes youwl want to think on that you dont want your mouf to walk you where your feet dont want to go.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“I cud feal some thing growing in me it wer like a grean sea surging in me it wer saying, LOSE IT. Saying, LET GO. Saying, THE ONLYES POWER IS NO POWER

The ruins of Canterbury Castle

”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“Every body knows Aunty. Stoan boans and iron tits and teef be twean her legs plus she has a iron willy for the ladys it gets red hot. When your time comes you have to do the juicy with her like it or not. She rides a girt big rat with red eyes it can see in the dark and it can smel whos ready for Aunty. Even if they dont know it ther selfs the rat can smel if theyre ready.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“Wel you know 1ce the kids start singing at you thats a cern kynd of track youre on nor there aint too much you can do about it. Making the kids stop singing wont help its too late by then youve jus got to clinch your teef and get on with it.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“Looking at them words going down on this paper right this minim I know there aint no such thing there aint no only my self you all ways have every 1 and every thing on your back.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“Ready to cry ready to dy ready for any thing is how I come to it now. In fear and tremmering only not running a way. In emtyness and ready to be fult. Not to lern no body nothing I cant even lern my oan self all I can do is try not to get in front of whats coming. Jus try to keap out of the way of it.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“Mark you that and noat you wel.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“I said, 'Yes theres a lot to look a head to. Like croaking iron at Widders Dump. We do the croaking and they get the iron.'
He said, 'Riddley theres other things to do as wel.'
I said, 'Yes and they all smel of cow shit dont they?”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“Trubba not.”
― Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker

“The harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all the poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty.”
― D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson

“…numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.”
― D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form

“Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilisation or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“The whole [scientific] process resembles biological evolution. A problem is like an ecological niche, and a theory is like a gene or a species which is being tested for viability in that niche.”
― David Deutsch, The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes--and Its Implications

“As the physicist Stephen Hawking put it, humans are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that’s in orbit round a typical star on the outskirts of a typical galaxy’. The proviso ‘in the cosmic scheme of things’ is necessary because the chemical scum evidently does have a special significance according to values that it applies to itself, such as moral values. But the Principle says that all such values are themselves anthropocentric: they explain only the behaviour of the scum, which is itself insignificant.”
― David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World

“The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.”
― Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

“His Mysterium Cosmographicum is an attempt, really, to reconcile the ancient Platonic dream of the harmony of the spheres with the sixteenth century’s insight that the planets move around the sun.”
― Thomas Hertog, On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory