Tim > Tim's Quotes

“And winning; that can be heavy on your back, too, like a monkey. You drop that load too when you find yourself an excuse."
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And Bert seemed to relax, knowing he had scored, had pushed his way through Eddie’s consciousness and through his defenses, although Eddie still only partly understood all of what Bert had said, and was already prepared to rationalize the truth out of what he did understand. But Bert had suddenly quit pushing, and seemed now to be merely relaxing with his drink. "That’s your problem," he said.”
― Walter Tevis, The Hustler

“I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”
― J.B.S. Haldane , Possible Worlds

“But when the fairy sang the whole world listened to him. Stephen felt clouds pause in their passing; he felt sleeping hills shift and murmur; he felt cold mists dance. He understood for the first time that the world is not dumb at all, but merely waiting for someone to speak to it in a language it understands. In the fairy’s song the earth recognized the names by which it called itself.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“After two hours it stopped raining and in the same moment the spell broke, which Peroquet and the Admiral and Captain Jumeau knew by a curious twist of their senses, as if they had tasted a string quartet, or been, for a moment, deafened by the sight of colour blue.”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Please don't tell me it was a double bluff ... Of all the even-numbered bluffs, the less-famous 'zero bluff' cancels itself out just as thoroughly, while attracting even less attention.”
― Greg Egan, Instantiation

“The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which means never losing your enthusiasm.”
― Aldous Huxley

“I felt such a need to rediscover the wind of the high sea, nothing else counted at that moment, neither earth nor men. All Joshua and I wanted was to be left alone with ourselves. Any other thing did not exist, had never existed. You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that’s all, and it is as simple as a ray of sunshine, as normal as the blue of the sky.”
― Bernard Moitessier, The Long Way

“Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
― T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“A Robin Redbreast in a Cage
Puts all Heaven in a Rage.
A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons
Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.
A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate
Predicts the ruin of the State.
A Horse misus’d upon the Road
Calls to Heaven for Human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fiber from the Brain does tear.”
― William Blake

“In so far as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable: and in so far as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.”
― Karl R. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery