„In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we're no more than castrated cats“

To Thomas Wentworth, cited by Luca Codignola in The Coldest Harbour of the Land (Québec, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988), p. 43.
Context: [B]eing bound for a long Journey to a Place which I have had a long Desire to visit, and have now the Opportunity and Leave to do: It is Newfoundland I mean, which imports me more than in Curiosity only to see; for I must either go and settle it in a better Order than it is, or else give it over, and lose all the Charges I have been at hitherto for other Men to build their Fortunes upon. And I had rather be esteemed a Fool for some by the Hazard of one Month's journey, than to prove myself one certainly for six Years by past, if the Business be now lost for some want of a little Pains and Care.

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Second term as Prime Minister
Source: Radio Interview for BBC Radio 3 (17 December 1985) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/105934

Source: Believing in God - Member Book

Book the First
Sordello (1840)

Taking Chances (1944)

The Reader's Digest, Volume 121 (1982), p. 118.
Attributed

Simon Lewis and Magnus Bane, pg. 689
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)

1.10 On the Misguided Romanticisation of Feline Psychopaths https://www.hedweb.com/hedethic/hedon1.htm#feline
The Hedonistic Imperative https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/514875 (1995)

Source: For Whom the Bell Tolls

[Jourdan, Kristi, Tea Party hopeful - gives voters third choice, Las Vegas Review-Journal, 1B, March 8, 2010]

John Langshaw Austin, Marina Sbisà (1975) How to Do Things with Words. p. 48.

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/05/060206.html
"The Show" (www.zefrank.com/theshow/)

More Than This
Song lyrics, Up (2002)

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 54

Source: Valiant

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.