“I do things like get in a taxi and say, "The library, and step on it.”
David Foster Wallace book Infinite Jest
Source: Infinite Jest
“An empty taxi arrived and out of it stepped Attlee.”
A joke about Clement Attlee doing the rounds after World War II, often wrongly attributed to Churchill. When he heard about that misattribution he said:
Mr Attlee is an honourable and gallant gentleman, and a faithful colleague who served his country well at the time of her greatest need. I should be obliged if you would make it clear whenever an occasion arises that I would never make such a remark about him, and that I strongly disapprove of anybody who does.
Churchill to John Colville (quoted in Nigel Rees, Sayings of the Century (1987), p. 106).
Misattributed
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Winston S. Churchill601
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1874–1965Related quotes
“Take one step out of yourself that you may arrive at God.”
Abu Sa'id Abu'l-Khayr (967–1049) poet
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 96
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer
From Nobel Prize for Literature speech 1995
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Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) Polish, poet, diplomat, prosaist, writer, and translator
"Birth" (1947)
Daylight (1953)
Yip Harburg (1896–1981) American song lyricist
"Optimistic Voices".
Context: You’re out of the woods
You’re out of the dark
You’re out of the night
Step into the sun, step into the light,
Keep straight ahead
For the most glorious place
On the Face of the Earth
Or the sky. Hold onto your breath
Hold onto your heart
Hold onto your hope,
March up to the gate
And bid it open.
“London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus”
Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist
In Search of Memory (2006)
Context: Birds in which spatial memory is particularly important—those that store food at a large number of sites, for example—have larger hippocampuses than other birds.... London taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus than others the same age.... the size of their hippocampus continues to increase with time on the job.
