“All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning.”
Lyra's Oxford (2003)
Context: All these tattered old bits and pieces have a history and a meaning. A group of them together can seem like the traces left by an ionizing particle in a bubble chamber: they draw the line of a path taken by something too mysterious to see. That path is a story, of course. What scientists do when they look at the line of bubbles on the screen is work out the story of the particle that made them: what sort of particle it must have been, and what caused it to move in that way, and how long it was likely to continue.
Dr. Mary Malone would have been familiar with that sort of story in the course of her search for dark matter. But it might not have occurred to her, for example, when she sent a postcard to an old friend shortly after arriving in Oxford for the first time, that that card itself would trace part of a story that hadn't yet happened when she wrote it. Perhaps some particles move backward in time; perhaps the future affects the past in some way we don't understand; or perhaps the universe is simply more aware than we are. There are many things we haven't yet learned how to read.
The story in this book is partly about that very process.
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Philip Pullman 161
English author 1946Related quotes
“Shattered people are best represented by bits and pieces.”
“The hardest bit of information to extract is the first piece.”
Prayers For The Assassin (2006)
Andrew Grove, in: " 1997 Technology Leader of the Year http://www.industryweek.com/companies-amp-executives/1997-technology-leader-yearandy-grove-building-information-age-legacy", IndustryWeek.com, December 15, 1997
1980s - 1990s
“Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him.”
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 6: The Vocation of Eloquence
Context: Education is something that affects the whole person, not bits and pieces of him. It doesn't just train the mind: it's a social and moral development too.
"The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner", from New and Collected Stories (1958; repr. London: Robson, 2003), p. 24.
Time is an Artist (1978) Epilogue : Old is Beautiful http://taimur.sarangi.info/text/kaufmann_time.htm
Context: Of course, not everything old is beautiful, any more than everything black, or everything white, or everything young. But the notion that old means ugly is every bit as harmful as the prejudice that black is ugly. In one way it is even more pernicious.
The notion that only what is new and young is beautiful poisons our relationship to the past and to our own future. It keeps us from understanding our roots and the greatest works of our culture and other cultures. It also makes us dread what lies ahead of us and leads many to shirk reality.