Travelling to Infinity Quotes

“Clearly here was someone, like me, who tended to stumble through life and managed to see the funny side of situations. Someone who, like me, was fairly shy, yet not averse to expressing his opinions; someone who unlike me had a developed sense of his own worth and had the effrontery to convey it.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“I say to you what I always say when things cannot be altered: count your blessingss.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity

“After that day I decided that never again would I depend on other people. However, putting that resolution into practice was easier said than done.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity

“Living each day as it came, rather than projecting some fanciful mirage on the distant future, was becoming a way of life.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity

“During these long periods of solitary contemplation in a setting of such dramatically haunting beauty, I found myself overcome by waves of loneliness.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“Although Galileo was a devout Catholic, it was his conflict with the Vatican, sadly mismanaged on both sides, that lay at the basis of the running battle between science and religion, a tragic and confusing schism which persists unresolved. More than ever today, religion finds its revelatory truths threatened by scientific theory, and retreats into a defensive corner, while scientists go into the attack insisting that rational argument is the only valid criterion for an understanding of the workings of the universe. Maybe both sides have misunderstood the nature of their respective roles. Scientists are equipped to answer the mechanical question of how the universe and everything in it, including life, came about. But since their modes of thought are dictated by purely rational, materialistic criteria, physicists cannot claim to answer the questions of why the universe exists, and why we human beings are here to observe it, any more than molecular biologists can satisfactorily explain why – if our actions are determined by the workings of a selfish genetic coding – we occasionally listen to the voice of conscience and behave with altruism, compassion and generosity. Even these human qualities have come under attack from evolutionary psychologists who have ascribed altruism to a crude genetic theory by which familial cooperation is said to favour the survival of the species. Likewise the spiritual sophistication of musical, artistic and poetic activity is regarded as just a highly advanced function of primitive origins.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“Live in the present, he said, and trust in God through darkness, pain and fear. Then, as he quoted the biblical passage from Corinthians "God will not suffer you to be tested more than you are able”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity

“Robert and Lucy were both finding it hard to adjust to new circumstances. Lucy now found herself in an uncertain situation in the middle of the family as neither the eldest nor the youngest child, and not until Robert went away to another scout camp later in the summer did she show any interest in the baby. Then she was suddenly called upon to fetch and carry bottles, nappies, pins and powder – chores that Robert had previously undertaken. At first she resisted defiantly, and then she burst into tears. At that moment I realized how badly she too had been affected by the trauma we had undergone since little Tim’s arrival. Lucy had been left to fend for herself when in fact she needed as much reassurance as anyone else. I hugged her and told her that I had not stopped loving her just because there was another person in the family to care for. She warmed to her little brother straight away, as if in all those miserable weeks she had been longing to show her true feelings but had not known how. She fetched and carried just as willingly as Robert had done, and thereafter no one could have been more devoted to Tim or more susceptible to his winning ways.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“In my simple, post-natal frame of mind, I was convinced that if the world were to be run by the mothers of newborn babies rather than hardened old men inciting brash youths to violence, wars would cease overnight.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity

“That single afternoon completely destroyed whatever illusions I might have held about combining motherhood with some sort of intellectual occupation.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“there were many well-qualified but unhappy wives in Cambridge whose individual talents had been totally disregarded, spurned by a system which refused to acknowledge that wives and mothers might be capable of an intellectual identity of their own.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“Fortunately Stephen was a better navigator than he had been a driver – except on those occasions when he would spot an exit at the last minute and yell at me to cross four lanes immediately.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“we were living and working in harmony, supporting each other, participating in each other’s interests, despite the disparity of our chosen subjects, despite attempts to divide us and despite the inevitable difficulties of Stephen’s worsening disability. We were very happy. We both gained confidence and courage from the strength of our mutual resolve and from our trust in each other.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“and for Stephen, who carried all his theories in his head, fine detail was a hindrance to clarity of thought.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“In the early days our arguments on the topics rehearsed above were playful and fairly light-hearted. Increasingly in later years, they became more personal, divisive and hurtful. The damaging schism between religion and science seemed to have extended its reach into our very lives: Stephen would adamantly assert the blunt positivist stance which I found too depressing and too limiting to my view of the world, because I fervently needed to believe that there was more to life than the bald facts of the laws of physics and the day-to-day struggle for survival.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“possibly because of their habit of bringing their reading matter to the dinner table and ignoring any non-bookworms present.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“Beside me stood the child’s father, young and vibrant despite the onset of disability. His general health was good, and his determination to enjoy life to the full – and to succeed in physics – was gaining strength by the day. Walking was difficult, buttons were a nuisance, mealtimes took longer and the brain had taken over from pen and paper, but these were mechanical problems which invention and perseverance could overcome. It was unthinkable that he could be a candidate for the sad ceremony we were attending that day. Death was the tragedy of old age, not of youth.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“They talked to him in his own intellectual terms, sometimes caustically sarcastic, sometimes crushingly critical, always humorous. In personal terms, however, they treated him with a gentle consideration which was almost loving.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“without getting up to make it myself. My parents came to the rescue with the gift of a tea-making machine. Thereafter I was troubled”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“Broadbent-Keeble, a respected pediatrician, came on a social call to visit Timothy”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“He had little respect for the intelligence of other people at the best of times. Now, at the worst of times, he was inclined to regard them all as morons. His fears were warranted, but not altogether for the reasons one might have supposed.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“I had to choose my words carefully in explaining how the American-inspired monetarist policies of the Thatcher government – which had been in power for the whole of Tim’s lifetime – were destroying our already overloaded, free NHS. The truth was that in encouraging a new self-seeking materialism, those policies were destroying not just the health service and our educational system, but the very fabric of society. Indeed Mrs Thatcher had denied the existence of society: for her it consisted of nothing more than a set of individuals with no sense of common purpose. It was an unfortunate time to be ill, unemployed, very young, elderly or otherwise socially disadvantaged.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“Whatever they may have felt about the risks of such a step, I was beginning to feel confident that Stephen would survive. How could he not survive with so many people contributing in every imaginable way to his recovery? Some”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“The contrast between the restrictions placed on him by his shrunken frame and his croaking speech on the one hand, and the power of his mind which allowed him to roam the outer reaches of the universe on the other, provided a fertile source for many imaginative flights of fanciful prose. Moreover”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life with Stephen

“As of the present chaos I could only hope that, by keeping faith, by still trying to give of one's best, a brighter, calmer day might one day.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity

“the classroom, surrounded by the clatter of massed old-fashioned typewriters and the chatter of ex-debs whose main claim to distinction seemed to be the”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“So much for the Welfare State. It had contributed so very little to our welfare that one might suppose that its purpose was actually to prevent the disabled from working to their full capacity and, consequently, from contributing as taxpayers to the National Exchequer. A handful of vitamin pills on prescription seemed to be the best it could offer with only minimal physical, practical, moral or financial support.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“The City Surveyor had never before heard of disabled people wanting to cross the city as far as Marks & Spencer to buy their own underwear, so he failed to see the need for such an expedition – as if disabled people and their families had no right to venture that far. Injustice spurred us into action. Why should Stephen have to suffer restraints on his lifestyle other than those inflicted by an unkind Nature?”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“Conversely, their intellectual heirs, some eight hundred years later, seemed intent on distancing science as far as possible from religion and on excluding God from any role in Creation.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen

“but through accidents of birth, prejudice or illness were less able to help themselves, it was a harsh society where only the fittest survived.”
― Jane Hawking, Travelling to Infinity: My Life With Stephen