James Watson Quotes

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.

I'm not saying you're more intelligent than Aristotle, or wiser. For all I know, Aristotle's the cleverest person who ever lived. That's not the point. The point is only that science is cumulative, and we live later.”
― Richard Dawkins

“She was altogether colorless and severe, and still she managed to be beautiful. Not the way that girls are generally beautiful, but more like the way a knife catches the light, makes you want to take it in your hands.”
― Brittany Cavallaro, A Study in Charlotte

“then he jumped..

I owe him so much. I needed him. I still do.

But he's gone.

He told me once that I shouldn't make people into heroes. He said that heroes didn't exist and that even if they did he wouldn't be one of them.

which goes to show. he wasn't right about everything..”
― Guy Adams, Sherlock: The Casebook

“It is one of the striking generalizations of biochemistry—which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical text-books—that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature. As far as I am aware the presently accepted set of twenty amino acids was first drawn up by Watson and myself in the summer of 1953 in response to a letter of Gamow's.”
― Francis Crick

“The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.”
― Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology

“I’d always hated those films—they’d portrayed Dr. Watson as a bumbling idiot, and Sherlock Holmes as an automaton.”
― Brittany Cavallaro, A Study in Charlotte

“I think that the formation of [DNA's] structure by Watson and Crick may turn out to be the greatest developments in the field of molecular genetics in recent years.”
― Linus Pauling

“So while Pauling struggled with his model, Watson and Crick turned theirs inside out, so the negative phosphorus ions wouldn’t touch. This gave them a sort of twisted ladder—the famed double helix.”
― Sam Kean, The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements

“Did you know that only older forests grow the sort of fungi that feeds the variety of orchid called Goodyera pubescens—”

“You’re making that up.”

“I promise you, I’m not making up mushroom facts for your amusement.”

“Pubescens? Pubescent orchid?” He snorted. “Has it grown a little stupid mustache? Does it skateboard?”
― Brittany Cavallaro, A Question of Holmes

“Holmes, my patron saint of trapdoors and fail-safes, of always remembering to pour the foundation so that, later, if you needed to, you could build a brilliant house on top.”
― Brittany Cavallaro, The Last of August

“I’m not stupid. I’ve never been stupid. I got good grades. I paid attention when someone was teaching me something, and I made it a point to learn it fast. Fine, I didn’t have Holmes’s training or her aptitude, but just because I wasn’t a genius didn’t mean that I wasn’t smart.”
― Brittany Cavallaro, The Last of August

“According to my instructions, I’m supposed to laugh at you now.”

“Go ahead?”

The voice managed a kind of embarrassed chuckle.
More soft tapping sounds, but the voice spoke again before they finished.

“I won’t give you my identity. It’s not important. Know that I am an interested party, and I want you to begin booking your travel back home. You have no particular skills. You know this. You’re a fairly standard teenage boy. You have no use but to be used.”

“I know it’s fun to be cryptic, but that last thing made zero sense.” I wanted the voice to keep talking, because as I wiggled my hands, I realized the zip tie wasn’t as tight as it needed to be.

“Think of yourself as a package. It’s Christmas, so picture a nicely wrapped present. Charlotte carries it around. It’s heavy in her arms, but it’s pleasing to look at it. Maybe the package talks. It’s witty. It’s flattering. It makes her feel special, and she likes that feeling. And one day Charlotte leaves it somewhere in public, and poof, it is taken from her. Charlotte is sad. Then furious. Charlotte will do anything to get her present back. Horrible things. Things that will end in her death, or imprisonment. We don’t want Charlotte to do these things.”

“So in this weird children’s story you’re telling me, I’m a talking package.” I’d put my wrists between my knees, and slowly, slowly, I worked one curled hand out of its binding. “That’s a pretty stupid extended metaphor. Did you fail English class? You were more of a math person, weren’t you?”
― Brittany Cavallaro, The Last of August

“The police aren’t going to let us help them, not if Shepard’s any indication,” she said. “Idiots. I suppose that they don’t like that I tampered with their crime scene.”

“We’re also their prime suspects,” I reminded her. “That sort of puts a damper on our working relationship.”
― Brittany Cavallaro, A Study in Charlotte

“Why did you help me?”

Hadrian looked down at Alistair. “He deserves to rot in a cell. He doesn’t get to pick his ending. He doesn’t get to burn down the house I’m hiding in, either, even if it is his own.”
― Brittany Cavallaro, The Case for Jamie

“What haunted me most wasn’t the ropes, or the chair, or the gasoline, though those played recurring parts in my nightmares. It wasn’t Alistair, or Hadrian’s crisis of conscience. It was that we’d had the time, Holmes and I. Three long minutes before the police made it to us, enough for her to turn to me and say, This is what you have to do, and why you have to do it.

No, what haunted me most was that I knew, had I confessed to August’s murder there on the lawn, Holmes would have found a way to clear my name. But she was letting her brother walk free for his mistake. She’d given up Bryony Downs to God knows what fate. She’d played judge and jury for Hadrian and Phillipa. And now she was letting herself be led away for a crime she didn’t commit, and she would walk away from it unscathed, and there would be no one doing time for August’s death.

It wasn’t hers to decide. It wasn’t mine, either. Charlotte Holmes had told me once that she wasn’t a good person. That day I’d begun to believe it.”
― Brittany Cavallaro, The Case for Jamie