“She had more curves than a scenic railway”

— P.G. Wodehouse

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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P.G. Wodehouse302

English author 1881–1975

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“Instead of opposing comic and tragic characters [as Molière and Shakespeare] and contrary scenic states, I organize the opposition of contrasting values, lines, and curves. I oppose curves to straight lines, flat surfaces to molded forms, pure local colors to nuances of gray. These initial plastic forms are either superimposed on objective elements or not, it makes no difference to me. There is only a question of variety.”

Fernand Léger (1881–1955) French painter

Quote from 'Notes on Contemporary Plastic Life', 'Kunstblatt', Berlin 1923; as quoted in The documents of 20th century art – Functions of Painting by Fernand Léger, in Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1973, p. 25
Quotes of Fernand Leger, 1920's

“The First World War had begun — imposed on the statesmen of Europe by railway timetables. It was an unexpected climax to the railway age.”

A.J.P. Taylor (1906–1990) Historian

The First World War ([1963] 1970) p. 20

“I had read a Tale of Two Cities and found it up to my standards as a romantic novel. She opened the first page and I heard poetry for the first time in my life… her voice slid in and curved down trough and over the words. She was nearly singing.”

Maya Angelou book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Source: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

“There is no such thing as abstract art, or else all art is abstract, which amounts to the same thing. Abstract art no more exists than does curved art yellow art or green art.”

Jean Dubuffet book Prospectus et tous écrits suivants

Source: 1960-70's, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, 1967, p. 206

“There will always be people who are ahead of the curve, and people who are behind the curve. But knowledge moves the curve.”

Bill James (1949) American baseball writer and statistician

The Mind of Bill James, 2006, p. 191

“It was a long way down. Before she had gone very far the curious dizziness she had known before came over her again, a dizziness not entirely induced by the spirals she whirled around, but a deeper, atomic unsteadiness as if not only she but also the substances around her were shifting. There was something queer about the angles of those curves. She was no scholar in geometry or aught else, but she felt intuitively that the bend and slant of the way she went were somehow outside any other angles or bends she had ever known. They led into the unknown and the dark, but it seemed to her obscurely that they led into deeper darkness and mystery than the merely physical, as if, though she could not put it clearly even into thoughts, the peculiar and exact lines of the tunnel had been carefully angled to lead through poly-dimensional space as well as through the underground—perhaps through time, too.”

C. L. Moore (1911–1987) American author

Black God's Kiss (1934); pp. 10-11
Short fiction, Jirel of Joiry (1969)

“I could give here several other ways of tracing and conceiving a series of curved lines, each curve more complex than any preceding one, but I think the best way to group together all such curves and them classify them in order, is by recognizing the fact that all points of those curves which we may call "geometric," that is, those which admit of precise and exact measurement, must bear a definite relation to all points of a straight line, and that this relation must be expressed by a single equation. If this equation contains no term of higher degree than the rectangle of two unknown quantities, or the square of one, the curve belongs to the first and simplest class, which contains only the circle, the parabola, the hyperbola, and the ellipse; but when the equation contains one or more terms of the third or fourth degree in one or both of the two unknown quantities (for it requires two unknown quantities to express the relation between two points) the curve belongs to the second class; and if the equation contains a term of the fifth or sixth degree in either or both of the unknown quantities the curve belongs to the third class, and so on indefinitely.”

René Descartes book La Géométrie

Second Book
La Géométrie (1637)

“A thrown-stone trajectory is a good metaphor for so many phenomena: the curve of an event, any event; the curve of a life, any life; the curve of a hypothesis; the curve experienced in the manufacture of a work of art; the curve of interest experienced in the manufacture of a catalogue.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Flying Out of This World

“[Mrs Thatcher] started quoting St Francis within minutes of becoming elected, and scarcely an hour had gone by before she was sounding like the book of Revelations read out over a railway station public address system by a headmistress of a certain age wearing calico knickers.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Zorba the Hun'
Essays and reviews, The Crystal Bucket (1982)

“In the thousands of articles that made up the technical literature of chaos, few were cited more often than "Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow." For years, no single object would inspire more illustrations, even motion pictures, than the mysterious curve depicted at the end, the double spiral that became known as the Lorenz attractor.”

James Gleick book Chaos: Making a New Science

Source: Chaos: Making a New Science, 1987, p. 52; as cited in: Joshua Keating, in " Can Chaos theory teach us anything about Foreign Policy http://ideas.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2013/05/23/can_chaos_theory_teach_us_anything_about_international_relations", at ideas.foreignpolicy.com, May 23rd 2013.

“She had more curves than a scenic railway”

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P.G. Wodehouse302

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