Eric Norris > Eric's Quotes

“They loved, and quarreled, and made up, and loved, and fought, and were true to each other and untrue. She made him the happiest man in the whole world and the most wretched, and after a few years she died, and then, when he was thirty, he died, too. But by that time Catullus had invented the love poem.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“I will take his secret to the grave, telling people I meet on the way.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“I would join Sisyphus in Hades and gladly push my boulder up the slope if only, each time it rolled back down, I were given a line of Aeschylus.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“If there's no love, what then?”
― Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Volume 1

“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“I am his Highness' dog at Kew;
Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?”
― Alexander Pope

“Stercus accidit.”
― David Hume

“Poetical feelings are a peril to scholarship. There are always poetical people ready to protest that a corrupt line is exquisite. Exquisite to whom? The Romans were foreigners writing for foreigners two millenniums ago; and for people whose gods we find quaint, whose savagery we abominate, whose private habits we don't like to talk about, but whose idea of what is exquisite is, we flatter ourselves, mysteriously identical to ours.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

“I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
― Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

“It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It's the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.”
― Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

“We're better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it'll rain on auntie's garden party three Sundays from now.”
― Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than quarks, quasars, big bangs, and black holes.

”
― Tom Stoppard

“People who like quotes love meaningless generalizations”
― Graham Greene

“To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.”
― Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

“He was surrounded by tyrants who thought they had a right to order him about: it was a conspiracy. He could not call his soul his own.”
― L.P. Hartley, Eustace and Hilda

“I was no longer satisfied with the small change of experience, which had hitherto contented me. I wanted to deal in larger sums.”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the gravities of terrestrial life.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shriveled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of men.”
― H. G. Wells, The Time Machine

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide.”
― H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

“You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
― Graham Greene, The Third Man

“The chances of anything man-like on Mars are a million to one”
― h.g. wells, The War of the Worlds

“Do not mourn the dead. They know what they are doing.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star