Tim Atkinson > Tim's Quotes

“Life is a book and you are its author. You detemine its plot and pace and you--only you--turn its pages.”
― Beth Mende Conny

“When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.”
― Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman

“This is not a real book; not really. A real book tells a story. A real book starts at the beginning and has a middle and an end and I should know. I've read enough of them. So many that one day I woke up as a character in one. I'm there now, trapped between the pages of a book about a girl who drops out of school, reads more than is good for her and ends up in the loony bin.”
― Tim Atkinson, Writing Therapy

“The spermatozoon that conveyed to the egg countless complicated individual and racial characteristics of the father was visible only through a microscope; even the most powerful magnification was not enough to show it as other than a homogeneous body, or to determine its origin; it looked the same in one animal as in another. These factors forced one to the assumption that the cell was in the same case as with the higher form it went to build up: that it too was already a higher form, composed in its turn by the division of living bodies, individual living units. Thus one passed from the supposed smallest unit to a still smaller one; one was driven to separate the elementary into its elements. No doubt at all but just as the animal kingdom was composed of various species of animals, as the human-animal organism was composed of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so the cell organism was composed of a new and varied animal kingdom of elementary units, far below microscopic size, which grew spontaneously, increased spontaneously according to the law that each could bring forth only after its kind, and, acting on the principle of a division of labour, served together the next higher order of existence.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defence, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall. The second creation, the birth of the organic out of the inorganic, was only another fatal stage in the progress of the corporeal toward consciousness, just as disease in the organism was an intoxication, a heightening and unlicensed accentuation of its physical state; and life, life was nothing but the next step on the reckless path of the spirit dishonoured; nothing but the automatic blush of matter roused to sensation and become receptive for that which awaked it.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain