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Atheist, homosexual, eccentric marathon-running English mathematician, A M Turing was in large part responsible not only for the development of computers ... but also for the cracking of German ciphers during the Second World War.

In heart and world alike, as if in a cage, there beats a happiness that has never been let out, never been experienced, and every human being feels its power but feels it as pain, because the action of this happiness is compressed and mutilated in confinement, like a heart inside a skeleton.

He cared for everything that existed, as if it were sacred, and his heart was too thrifty not to notice whatever might serve as consolation.

New Year's Day is a melancholy and a tedious one for everybody who has no particular reason to celebrate. There is the change in the year's date, for one thing, which provokes thought, and there is the enforced idleness for another, coming upon energetic people like a temporary paralysis and leaving them nothing to do but meditate.

Ah, gracious lord, these days are dangerous./Virtue is choked with foul ambition,/And charity chased hence by rancor's hand./Foul subornation is predominant,/And equity exiled [from] your highness' land.

I always wanted to read this book, and I thought that Christmas would be the best time.

On occasion, I consider the two varieties of pain I've experienced—the physical and the psychological. And I often believe that I prefer the physical. It's tangible and palpable in a way that the ghosts that haunt my sleepless nights never are and never will be. There's a hope too in the physical pain, a hope of some cure or remedy....

Many is the time the poor fellows, just buttoning the necks of their clean frocks, are startled by the cry of "There she blows!" and away they fly to fight another whale, and go through the whole weary thing again. Oh! my friends but this is man-killing! Yet this is life.

As blind and deaf the whale plunged forward, as if by sheer power of speed to rid himself of the iron leech that had fastened to him: as we thus tore a white gash in the sea, on all sides menaced as we flew, by the crazed creatures to and fro rushing about us: our beset boat was like a ship mobbed by ice-isles in a tempest....

It does seem to me, that herein we see the rare virtue of a strong individual vitality, and the rare virtue of thick walls, and the rare virtue of interior spaciousness. Oh man! admire and model thyself after the whale! Do thou too remain warm among ice. Do thou too live in this world without being of it. Be cool at the Equator; keep thy blood fluid at the Pole.

Come, Ahab's compliments to ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run. Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way!

(Captain Peleg:) So good-bye to thee—and wrong not Captain Ahab. Besides, my boy, he has a wife—not three voyages wedded—a sweet, resigned girl. Think of that; by that sweet girl that old man has a child: hold ye then there can be any utter, hopeless harm in Ahab? No, no, my lad; stricken, blasted, if he be, Ahab has his humanities.

here were girls loitering all along the sidewalk, teetering about in their high-heeled shoes; they walked nonchalantly up and down, accosted each passer-by and muttered a few words, always the same ones, repeated like a litany, and then walked off again, shrugging or cursing under their breath.

His late majesty's father ... had a good idea: liquidate all the foreign supermarkets and replace them with Russian kiosks. And put two types of each thing in every kiosk, so the people have a choice. Because our Russian people should choose from two things, not from three or thirty-three.

Before 1989 Poles used to illustrate Poland's geopolitical predicament and their bitter feelings about Germans and Russians with a caustic joke. Question: 'If Poland were to be invaded again by Germany and the Soviet Union, in which direction should one shoot first?' Answer: 'To the west: first business, then pleasure.'

And dawn surprised them thus enlaced together—eyes fixed on eyes, hands clasped in hands—whilst their moist and burning lips were still murmuring that immortal word "that for five thousand years has lingered nightly on lovers' lips."

One of our harpooneers told me that he caught once a whale in Spitzbergen that was white all over." —A Voyage to Greenland, A.D. 1671. Harris Coll.

At midnight, as there was no more wood, and it was very cold, the guests who were seated drew lots as to who should cast his chair into the fire. By one o'clock every one was standing.

Bohemia is a stage in artistic life; it is the preface of the Academy, the Hotel Dieu, or the Morgue. We will add that Bohemia only exists and is only possible in Paris.

Suddenly, in the midst of speech, he was attacked by discouragement and fatigue. He became aware of himself and Mafferty in the quiet office, to casual lumps of matter set in accidental proximity amid vacant wastes of air.

Heav'n is for thee too high/To know what passes there; be lowly wise;/Think only what concerns thee and they being;/Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there/Live, in what state, condition or degree,/Contented that thus far hath been reveal'd/Not of Earth only bhut of highest Heav'n.

Hell thir fit habitation fraught with fire/Unquenchable, the house of woe and pain./Disburd'n'd Heav'n rejoic'd, and soon repair'd/Her mural breach, returning whence it roll'd.

Behold mee then, mee for him, life for life/I offer, on mee let thine anger fall;/Account mee man; I for his sake will leave/Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee/Freely put off, and for him lastly die....

She was overcome by an odd need for tidiness. That vase someone had moved, this overcoat of Herlin's draped over a chair, the dust over there on the shelf ... were so many marches stolen by the enemy. Obscure portents of doom. Of the doom against which she was battling. The dustless gilt of the bric-a-brac, the chairs in their proper places were bright facets of reality.

We're all of us living in a house we're not used to ... a house full of -- voices, noises, objects, strange shadows, light that's even stranger -- We can't understand. We bark and jump around and try to -- be -- pleasingly playful in this big mysterious house but -- in our hearts we're all very afraid of it.

Others said again that the bard had never existed. Hope, delight, danger had quickened the west at that time. Through such swirling mists men and women imagine marvellous harp strokes.

It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me.

Trips to the bathroom and the weed, which never seemed to run out, made all the sensation more fragmentary, bizarre, grotesque. People lay knotted together grimly, while others danced in stumbling gaiety, or fought their way to glasses. Talk capsuled into exclamations and laughter, the sense of having watchers around vanished from everyone's mind, and they wandered off, paired off, retired to corners....

And now he sat, not sad though thoroughly unnerved, thinking to himself that here, two scant hours later, he was watching some confraternity of the lost and damned assemble. And yet somehow he was not repulsed, but rather yearned to know it in its every aspect, the lives these people led, the emotions they endured, the fate into which they stumbled, perhaps not unawares.