Quotes about hair
page 6

André Maurois photo

“Old age is far more than white hair, wrinkles, the feeling that it is too late and the game finished, that the stage belongs to the rising generations. The true evil is not the weakening of the body, but the indifference of the soul. Upon crossing the shadow line, it is more the desire to act than the power to do so that is lost. Is it possible, after fifty years of experiences and disappointments, to retain the ardent curiosity of youth, the desire to know and understand, the power to love wholeheartedly, the certainty that beauty, intelligence, and kindness unite naturally, and to preserve faith in the efficacy of reason? Beyond the shadow line lies the realm of even, tempered light where the eyes, not being dazzled any more by the blinding sun of desire, can see things and people as they are. How is it possible to believe in the moral perfection of pretty women if you have loved one of them? How is it possible to believe in progress when you have discovered throughout a long and difficult life that no violent change can triumph over human nature and that it is only the most ancient customs and ceremonies that can provide people with the flimsy shelter of civilization? "What's the use?" says the old man to himself. This is perhaps the most dangerous phrase he can utter, for after having said: "What's the use of struggling?" he will say one day: "What's the use of going out?" then: "What's the use of leaving my room?" then: "What's the use of leaving my bed?" and at last comes "What's the use of living?"”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

which opens the portals of death.
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Growing Old

Paul of Tarsus photo
Saki photo
James D. Watson photo

“I suspect that in the beginning Maurice hoped that Rosy would calm down. Yet mere inspection suggested that she would not easily bend. By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents. So it was quite easy to imagine her the product of an unsatisfied mother who unduly stressed the desirability of professional careers that could save bright girls from marriages to dull men. But this was not the case. Her dedicated austere life could not be thus explained — she was the daughter of a solidly comfortable, erudite banking family.
Clearly Rosy had to go or be put in her place. The former was obviously preferable because, given her belligerent moods, it would be very difficult for Maurice to maintain a dominant position that would allow him to think unhindered about DNA. Not that at times he'd didn't see some reason for her complaints — King's had two combination rooms, one for men, the other for women, certainly a thing of the past. But he was not responsible, and it was no pleasure to bear the cross for the added barb that the women's combination room remained dingily pokey whereas money had been spent to make life agreeable for him and his friends when they had their morning coffee.
Unfortunately, Maurice could not see any decent way to give Rosy the boot. To start with, she had been given to think that she had a position for several years. Also there was no denying that she had a good brain. If she could keep her emotions under control, there was a good chance she could really help him. But merely wishing for relations to improve was taking something of a gamble, for Cal Tech's fabulous chemist Linus Pauling was not subject to the confines of British fair play. Sooner or later Linus, who had just turned fifty, was bound to try for the most important of all scientific prizes. There was no doubt he was interested. … The thought could not be avoided that the best home for a feminist was in another person's lab.”

Description of Rosalind Franklin, whose data and research were actually key factors in determining the structure of DNA, but who died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, before the importance of her work could be widely recognized and acknowledged. In response to these remarks her mother stated "I would rather she were forgotten than remembered in this way." As quoted in "Rosalind Franklin" at Strange Science : The Rocky Road to Modern Paleontology and Biology by Michon Scott http://www.strangescience.net/rfranklin.htm
The Double Helix (1968)

Han-shan photo
Helen Diner photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
Iain Banks photo

“He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred meters, or, better still, millimeters.”

Source: Culture series, Excession (1996), Chapter 5 “Kiss the Blade” section IV (p. 151).

William Morris photo
Zadie Smith photo
Amit Chaudhuri photo
Bion of Borysthenes photo

“It hurts the bald-head just as much as the thatched-head to have his hairs plucked.”

Bion of Borysthenes (-325–-246 BC) ancient greek philosopher

As quoted by Seneca, On Tranquility of the Mind

Ignatius Sancho photo

“Old folks love to seem wise- and if you are silly enough to correspond with grey hairs, take the consequence.”

Ignatius Sancho (1729–1780) British composer, writer and grocer

(from vol 2, letter 1: some time in 1778, to Mr J___ W___e ).

Derren Brown photo

“Paul [McKenna] and I have been working on making each other’s hair fall out for years now, with some success.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV recordings of stage shows, Svengali (2012), Svengali tour brochure

Jodi Benson photo
Ian Fleming photo

“We have as much evidence that T. rex was feathered, at least during some stage of its life, as we do that australopithecines like Lucy had hair.”

Mark Norell (1957) American paleontologist

As quoted by B. Keim (2012) "Giant Feathered Tyrannosaur Found in China" Wired (April 4, 2012)

Thomas Henry Huxley photo

“I've talked to him on the phone, received notes through the mail, but I've never seen him face to face. I sent him my last LP and I understand that he turned his head away as he took the disc out, saying, "I don't want to see what he looks like. I have this image and I don't want to destroy it." So there's a certain amount of mystery involved. I suppose if he knew I were a gray-haired, older guy with a big paunch, he might say, "Oh, that ruins it."”

Clare Fischer (1928–2012) American keyboardist, composer, arranger, and bandleader

On his working relationship with Prince, as quoted in "He Arranges, Composes, Performs: Fischer: A Renaissance Man Of Music" http://articles.latimes.com/1987-05-14/entertainment/ca-8949_1_clare-fischer by Zan Stewart, in The Los Angeles Times (May 14, 1987)

Alexander Pope photo

“Fair tresses man's imperial race ensnare,
And beauty draws us with a single hair.”

Canto II, line 27. Compare: "No cord nor cable can so forcibly draw, or hold so fast, as love can do with a twined thread", Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, Part iii, Section 2, Membrane 1, Subsection 2.
The Rape of the Lock (1712, revised 1714 and 1717)

Frederick Douglass photo

“But are there not reasons against all this? Is there not such a law or principle as that of self-preservation? Does not every race owe something to itself? Should it not attend to the dictates of common sense? Should not a superior race protect itself from contact with inferior ones? Are not the white people the owners of this continent? Have they not the right to say what kind of people shall be allowed to come here and settle? Is there not such a thing as being more generous than wise? In the effort to promote civilization may we not corrupt and destroy what we have? Is it best to take on board more passengers than the ship will carry? To all this and more I have one among many answers, altogether satisfactory to me, though I cannot promise it will be entirely so to you. I submit that this question of Chinese immigration should be settled upon higher principles than those of a cold and selfish expediency. There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal and indestructible. Among these is the right of locomotion; the right of migration; the right which belongs to no particular race, but belongs alike to all and to all alike. It is the right you assert by staying here, and your fathers asserted by coming here. It is this great right that I assert for the Chinese and the Japanese, and for all other varieties of men equally with yourselves, now and forever. I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity, and when there is a supposed conflict between human and national rights, it is safe to go the side of humanity. I have great respect for the blue-eyed and light-haired races of America. They are a mighty people. In any struggle for the good things of this world, they need have no fear, they have no need to doubt that they will get their full share. But I reject the arrogant and scornful theory by which they would limit migratory rights, or any other essential human rights, to themselves, and which would make them the owners of this great continent to the exclusion of all other races of men. I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races, but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

George Meredith photo
Douglas Adams photo
Harriet Beecher Stowe photo
Han-shan photo
Oliver Wendell Holmes photo
George William Russell photo
Han-shan photo
Norman Mailer photo
Lil Wayne photo
William McDougall photo
Revilo P. Oliver photo
H. G. Wells photo

“"You don't understand," he said, "who I am or what I am. I'll show you. By Heaven! I'll show you." Then he put his open palm over his face and withdrew it. The centre of his face became a black cavity. "Here," he said. He stepped forward and handed Mrs. Hall something which she, staring at his metamorphosed face, accepted automatically. Then, when she saw what it was, she screamed loudly, dropped it, and staggered back. The nose—it was the stranger's nose! pink and shining—rolled on the floor.Then he removed his spectacles, and everyone in the bar gasped. He took off his hat, and with a violent gesture tore at his whiskers and bandages. For a moment they resisted him. A flash of horrible anticipation passed through the bar. "Oh, my Gard!" said some one. Then off they came.It was worse than anything. Mrs. Hall, standing open-mouthed and horror-struck, shrieked at what she saw, and made for the door of the house. Everyone began to move. They were prepared for scars, disfigurements, tangible horrors, but nothing! The bandages and false hair flew across the passage into the bar, making a hobbledehoy jump to avoid them. Everyone tumbled on everyone else down the steps. For the man who stood there shouting some incoherent explanation, was a solid gesticulating figure up to the coat-collar of him, and then—nothingness, no visible thing at all!”

Source: The Invisible Man (1897), Chapter 7: The Unveiling of the Stranger

Ludovico Ariosto photo

“His hair stands up erect and from his face
All vestiges of colour seem to drain.
He tries to speak but can emit no trace
Of sound.”

Ogni pelo arricciossi
E scolorossi al Saracino il viso,
La voce ch'era per uscir fermossi.
Canto I, stanza 29 (tr. Barbara Reynolds)
Orlando Furioso (1532)

Grace Jones photo
Paula Modersohn-Becker photo
John Yau photo
James Bay photo

“When you make a certain sound and look your thing, it makes it all the more impactful to drop that and start with a new thing. So I cut my hair off and lost the hat. It felt only natural to me to tear that canvas down and put a new one up.”

James Bay (1990) British singer-songwriter

[2018-03-28, https://www.femalefirst.co.uk/music/musicnews/james-bays-reinvention-inspired-sheeran-taylor-swift-1136499.html, James Bay's reinvention inspired by Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift, femalefirst.co.uk, 2018-08-25]

Sara Teasdale photo
William Wordsworth photo
Daisy Ashford photo

“Ethel patted her hair and looked very sneery.”

Source: The Young Visiters (1919), Chapter 8

Adolf Hitler photo
Thomas Dunn English photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“I recorded my hair this morning. Tonight I'm watching the highlights.”

Jay London (1966) American comedian

One-liners

Julio Cortázar photo

“"Hair loss and retrieval" (Translation of "Pérdida y recuperación del pelo")


To combat pragmatism and the horrible tendency to achieve useful purposes, my elder cousin proposes the procedure of pulling out a nice hair from the head, knotting it in the middle and droping it gently down the hole in the sink. If the hair gets caught in the grid that usually fills in these holes, it will just take to open the tap a little to lose sight of it.


Without wasting an instant, must start the hair recovery task. The first operation is reduced to dismantling the siphon from the sink to see if the hair has become hooked in any of the rugosities of the drain. If it is not found, it is necessary to expose the section of pipe that goes from the siphon to the main drainage pipe. It is certain that in this part will appear many hairs and we will have to count on the help of the rest of the family to examine them one by one in search of the knot. If it does not appear, the interesting problem of breaking the pipe down to the ground floor will arise, but this means a greater effort, because for eight or ten years we will have to work in a ministry or trading house to collect enough money to buy the four departments located under the one of my elder cousin, all that with the extraordinary disadvantage of what while working during those eight or ten years, the distressing feeling that the hair is no longer in the pipes anymore can not be avoided and that only by a remote chance remains hooked on some rusty spout of the drain.


The day will come when we can break the pipes of all the departments, and for months to come we will live surrounded by basins and other containers full of wet hairs, as well as of assistants and beggars whom we will generously pay to search, assort, and bring us the possible hairs in order to achieve the desired certainty. If the hair does not appear, we will enter in a much more vague and complicated stage, because the next section takes us to the city's main sewers. After buying a special outfit, we will learn to slip through the sewers at late night hours, armed with a powerful flashlight and an oxygen mask, and explore the smaller and larger galleries, assisted if possible by individuals of the underworld, with whom we will have established a relationship and to whom we will have to give much of the money that we earn in a ministry or a trading house.


Very often we will have the impression of having reached the end of the task, because we will find (or they will bring us) similar hairs of the one we seek; but since it is not known of any case where a hair has a knot in the middle without human hand intervention, we will almost always end up with the knot in question being a mere thickening of the caliber of the hair (although we do not know of any similar case) or a deposit of some silicate or any oxide produced by a long stay against a wet surface. It is probable that we will advance in this way through various sections of major and minor pipes, until we reach that place where no one will decide to penetrate: the main drain heading in the direction of the river, the torrential meeting of detritus in which no money, no boat, no bribe will allow us to continue the search.


But before that, and perhaps much earlier, for example a few centimeters from the mouth of the sink, at the height of the apartment on the second floor, or in the first underground pipe, we may happen to find the hair. It is enough to think of the joy that this would cause us, in the astonished calculation of the efforts saved by pure good luck, to choose, to demand practically a similar task, that every conscious teacher should advise to its students from the earliest childhood, instead of drying their souls with the rule of cross-multiplication or the sorrows of Cancha Rayada.”

Julio Cortázar (1914–1984) Argentinian writer

Historias de Cronopios y de Famas (1962)

John Lancaster Spalding photo
Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo
William Wordsworth photo
Peter Wentz photo

“Q: Will Fall Out Boy ever become Fall Out Man?
A: The chest hair is in the mail. So hopefully we will in four to six weeks. depending on shipping.”

Peter Wentz (1979) American musician

http://www.falloutboyrock.com/falloutboy/blog_detail.php?uf_system_id=3 Fall Out Boy Rock Q&A section. Question from April 13, 2007.
FallOutBoyRock.com

Omar Khayyám photo
Cristoforo Colombo photo
Rick Baker photo
John Fante photo
André Maurois photo
Mark Helprin photo
Plutarch photo
Joe Hill photo

“Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.”

Joe Hill (1879–1915) Swedish-American labor activist, songwriter, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World

"The Preacher and the Slave" http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Preacher_and_the_Slave (1911)

John Greenleaf Whittier photo

“So fallen! so lost! the light withdrawn
Which once he wore;
The glory from his gray hairs gone
For evermore!”

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) American Quaker poet and advocate of the abolition of slavery

Ichabod, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Isa Genzken photo

“Sex and politics - sex and politicians. I never understand how any politician gets a shag, really. Can you? A classic example: the David Mellor sex scandal. I bet you're the same as me. We're not shocked by these scandals involving politicians. I bet when that happened, your response was not 'Good God, that's outrageous! A man in his job, he should be running the country, not messing about like this; no wonder we're in a state; terrible!' No, that wasn't the response. You open the paper, you read about that, and you go 'Ha ha ha ha - I don't think so, Dave! I don't think so. In your dreams, perhaps.' The interesting person in that relationship is not him; it's her - Antonia. A woman of mystery; a mystery woman. Antonia de Sancha, always described as an 'unemployed actress'. Unemployed actress? How's she an unemployed actress? God! if you can feign sexual interest in David Mellor, I should think Chekhov's a piece of piss. So, she thinks 'I'm an actress. It's a role. I'll prepare'. She gets to the bedroom situation. He's in a kit-off situation, and there's Antonia giving it 'Red lorry, yellow lorry - Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper'. But the hair - that's the main unattractive thing. What barber told him that suited him? Someone winding him up there. 'Yes, David, that'll suit you, mate: a greasy, oily flap of dirty-looking patent leather, wafting about down one side of your moosh; that'll drive those unemployed actresses mental!' (Linda Live, 1993)”

Linda Smith (1958–2006) comedian

Stand-up

Dita Von Teese photo

“At eurovision, The Armenians are killing me with their hair and especially the fierce cateye liner! LOVE! I am part Armenian, in fact.”

Dita Von Teese (1972) American burlesque dancer, model and actress

On the Armenians in the Eurovision Song Contest https://twitter.com/DitaVonTeese/status/1808509968 (15 May 2009).

Gillian Anderson photo
Camille Paglia photo
Mark Satin photo
Wilhelm Liebknecht photo
Helen Hayes photo

“Actors work and slave — and it is the color of your hair that can determine your fate in the end.”

Helen Hayes (1900–1993) actress

Source: On Reflection (1968), Ch. 4

Cat Stevens photo

“Her clothes are made of rainbows
And twenty thousand tears
Shine through the spaces
Of her golden ochre hair”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Angelsea
Song lyrics, Catch Bull at Four (1972)

Abbie Hoffman photo
Heidi Klum photo
Connie Willis photo
Louis C.K. photo
Andy Warhol photo
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec photo
Bono photo
Gail Dines photo
Bruce Springsteen photo
Jodie Marsh photo

“For so long I hid behind the blonde hair and the blue eyes. Now I feel like I've done it, I've done what I set out to achieve, now I can just go back to being me.”

Jodie Marsh (1978) English glamour model and television personality

Interview in The Guardian, 25 January 2006 http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2006/jan/25/broadcasting.bigbrother

George Lippard photo
Antonio Negri photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Sinclair Lewis photo
Margaret Atwood photo
Booker T. Washington photo

“Opportunity is like a bald-headed man with only a patch of hair right in front. You have to grab that hair, grasp the opportunity while it's confronting you, else you'll be grasping a slick bald head.”

Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) African-American educator, author, orator, and advisor

This seems to be a paraphrase sumarizing a speech at the Carrie Tuggle Institute, Birmingham, as described in Thinking Black: Some of the Nation's Best Black Columnists Speak Their Mind (1997) by DeWayne Wickham
Misattributed

Bion of Borysthenes photo

“How stupid it was for the king to tear out his hair in grief, as if baldness were a cure for sorrow.”

Bion of Borysthenes (-325–-246 BC) ancient greek philosopher

As quoted by Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, iii. 26

William Blake photo

“For every thing exists & not one sigh nor smile nor tear,
One hair nor particle of dust, not one can pass away.”

William Blake (1757–1827) English Romantic poet and artist

Source: 1800s, Jerusalem The Emanation of The Giant Albion (c. 1803–1820), Ch. 1, plate 13, line 66 — plate 14, line 1

Michael Rosen photo

“I mucked about with his hair. His shoes
were where he left them. His shoes are where he
left them.”

Michael Rosen (1946) British children's writer

Carrying the Elephant

Hal David photo