“Hypotheses pinned me down, as Gulliver was pinned by the countless threads of the Lilliputians…”
Daniel Martin (1977)
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John Fowles 120
British writer 1926–2005Related quotes

“I love to dream, but do not wish
To have a pin prick rouse me.”
J'aime à réver, mais ne veux pas
Qu'à coups d'épingle on me réveille.
La Conversation; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 815-16.

“350. A Pin a Day is a Groat a Year.”
Compare Poor Richard's Almanack (1737) : A pin a day is a Groat a Year.
Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Section 1.16
The Crosswicks Journal, A Circle of Quiet (1972)

Vol. II, p. 31
1980s, Letters to the Schools (1981, 1985)
Context: Attention is this hearing and this seeing, and this attention has no limitation, no resistance, so it is limitless. To attend implies this vast energy: it is not pinned down to a point. In this attention there is no repetitive movement; it is not mechanical. There is no question of how to maintain this attention, and when one has learnt the art of seeing and hearing, this attention can focus itself on a page, a word. In this there is no resistance which is the activity of concentration. Inattention cannot be refined into attention. To be aware of inattention is the ending of it: not that it becomes attentive. The ending has no continuity. The past modifying itself is the future — a continuity of what has been — and we find security in continuity, not in ending. So attention has no quality of continuity. Anything that continues is mechanical. The becoming is mechanical and implies time. Attention has no quality of time. All this is a tremendously complicated issue. One must gently, deeply go into it.