Quotes about table
page 2

“I invited myself. Thought this table needed some class.”

Source: The Diviners

“Amy, Dan, and Nellie were sitting at a table in a conference room, examining reproductions of Franklin documents-some so rare, the librarians told her, the only copies existed in Paris.
"Yeah, here's a rare grocery list," Dan muttered. "Wow.”

Rick Riordan The Maze of Bones

Source: The Maze of Bones

“We sat around the kitchen table picking off of foil-covered plates. Conrad kept sneaking looks at me, and every time I looked back, he looked away. I'm right here, I wanted to tell him. I'm still here.”

Jenny Han (1980) American writer

Source: The Summer I Turned Pretty

Time

“Who has been unhooking the stars without my permission, and putting them on the table in the guise of candles?”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Star

“I took the volume to a table, opened its soft, ivory pages… and fell into it as into a pool during dry season.”

Janet Fitch book White Oleander

Source: White Oleander

Season

“Blake took a small roll from the tray on the table, then put it back in favor of a larger one. And maybe a little butter. It certainly couldn't hurt. And jam… no, he drew the line at jam. She was a spy, after all.”

Julia Quinn (1970) American novelist

Source: To Catch an Heiress

Hurt

“How do you fight someone smarter than yourself?' Rand Whispered. 'The answer is simple. You make her think that you are sitting down across the table from her, ready to play her game. Then you punch her in the face as hard as you can.”

Brandon Sanderson The Wheel of Time

Source: The Gathering Storm

Game, Thinking, Fight

“I buy wine according to the bottle design. After I get down the first glass it all tastes okay to me so I figure you go for something classy to look at on the table”

Janet Evanovich (1943) Novelist

Source: Smokin' Seventeen

Wine

“He could cheat on me and he would never tell me, and he would think less and less of me for not figuring it out. He would see me across the breakfast table, innocently slurping cereal, and know that I am a fool, and how can anyone respect a fool?”

Gillian Flynn book Gone Girl

Source: Gone Girl

Fools, Thinking, Cheating

“No rescue boat can save the touches I left bobbing in the wild ocean of your flesh, but if they cut open your heart, like the belly of a shark, dumped its contents on a table—would there be any trace of me?”

Jeffrey McDaniel (1967) American writer

Source: The Splinter Factory

Heart

“I was a beautiful vampire princess loved, worshiped and admired by all. I lived in a luxurious gothic castle and I have no idea how I ended up at this fiberglass table with you losers.”

Alyson Nöel book Evermore

Source: Evermore

Love, Beauty, Idea, Princess

“Now do you see why war irritates me? It's always the same. A lot of people get killed, but in the end, the whole thing is settled at the conference table. The notion of having the conference first doesn't seem to occur to people.”

David Eddings book Belgarath the Sorcerer

Source: Belgarath the Sorcerer

War, People

“I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived… and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.”

Chuck Palahniuk Fight Club

Source: Fight Club

Men, Waiting

“As beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table.”

Comte de Lautréamont (1846–1870) French poet

Beauty, Chance

“Just because I’m Native American doesn’t mean I can track furniture through the wilderness.” She deepened her voice: “‘Yes, kemosabe. A three-legged table passed this way an hour ago.’ Heck, I don’t know.”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Diaries

Source: The Demigod Diaries

Way

“Dinner's in one hour. If you're not back, sitting at the table, I'll beat you all unconscious with a spatula.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Source: Blue Smoke

“Gambling is not a vice, it is an expression of our humanness. We gamble. Some do it at the gaming table, some do not. You play, you win, you play, you lose, you play.”

Jeanette Winterson book The Passion

Source: The Passion (1987), p.73

Game

“Myrnin was heading for Kim when she picked up a crossbow lying on a table nearby and shot him pointblank in the chest.
He staggered backward, muttered, "Not”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Bite Club

Lying

“raking a hand through his hair, he forced his attention to the text she'd left on the coffee table, refusing to dwell on the disconcerting fact that a part of him had taken one look at the lass in such proximity to his bed and said simply: Mine”

Karen Marie Moning (1964) author

Source: The Dark Highlander

Coffee, Parting

“Humility is my table, respect is my garment, empathy is my food and curiosity is my drink. As for love, it has a thousand names and is by my side at every window.”

Tariq Ramadan (1962) Swiss muslim scholar

Source: The Quest for Meaning: Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism

Love, Food, Drink

“I want to put on the table, not why 85% of the members of the National Academy of Sciences reject God, I want to know why 15% of the National Academy don’t.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

God, Science

“In the end, coming to faith remains for all a sense of homecoming, of picking up the threads of a lost life, of responding to a bell that had long been ringing, of taking a place at a table that had long been vacant.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Life, Faith, Sense

“Peter was not very well during the evening. His mother put him to bed, and made some chamomile tea: "One table-spoonful to be taken at bedtime.”

Beatrix Potter book The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Source: The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Tea

“I'd rather have roses on my table than diamonds on my neck.”

Emma Goldman (1868–1940) anarchist known for her political activism, writing, and speeches

“My behavior is nonetheless, deplorable. Unfortunately, I'm quite prone to such bouts of deplorability--take for instance, my fondness for reading books at the dinner table.”

Brandon Sanderson (1975) American fantasy writer

Source: The Final Empire

Books, Behavior, Reading

“Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.”

Diane Ackerman (1948) Author, poet, naturalist

Time

“The meeting was like a war council with donuts. Then again, back at Camp Half-Blood they used to have their most serious discussions around the Ping-Pong table in the rec room with crackers and Cheez Whiz, so Percy felt right at home.”

Rick Riordan The Mark of Athena

Source: The Mark of Athena

War, Home

“Its always nice to have a stud muffin at the table.”

Janet Evanovich Three to Get Deadly

Source: Three to Get Deadly

“This is a story about a family and, as there is a ghost involved, you might cal it a ghost story. But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at out tables long after they have gone.”

Mitch Albom For One More Day

Source: For One More Day

Family, Dead

“Calvin is hammering nails into coffee table.
Mom: CALVIN WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE COFFEE TABLE?!?
Calvin: Is this some sort of trick question, or what?”

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

Coffee, Moms, Question

“Policeman: "A hermit eh? Then why's your table set for four?"

Groucho: "That's nothing. My alarm clock is set for eight.”

Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American comedian

“Jason looked like her was trying to figure out an equation. "Let me get this straight. Your table ran away… because you polished him with windex.”

Rick Riordan book The Demigod Diaries

Source: The Demigod Diaries

“Other dads actually sat at the dinner table. Mine left me a fifty and a reminder to do my goddamn katas.”

Lilith Saintcrow book Strange Angels

Source: Strange Angels

“I like on the table,
when we're speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Intelligence, Light, Wine

“I like to have a martini,
Two at the very most.
After three I’m under the table,
After four I’m under my host.”

Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist

Variant of: I wish I could drink like a lady. “Two or three,” at the most. But two, and I’m under the table— And three, I'm under the host. The Harlequin, Volume 2, 1959, University of Virginia (page ? http://books.google.com/books?id=zdFKAAAAYAAJ&q=%22under+the+table%22+%22under+the+host%22) Perhaps attributed due to “One more drink and I'd have been under the host.” (see above). “ Martini Madness: Dorothy Parker didn’t write the famous quatrain about martinis that’s always attributed to her. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/drink/features/2013/martini_madness_tournament/sweet_16/dorothy_parker_martini_poem_why_the_attribution_is_spurious.html”, Troy Patterson, Slate, April 8, 2013 Misattributed Variant: One martini. Two at the most. Three I'm under the table, four I'm under the host! Source: The Collected Dorothy Parker

“Put some clothes on, you weird, yellow-eyed, table-dancing, werewolf-training, cryptic, stare-me-right-in-the-eyes-and-don't-even-blink wench.”

Jim Butcher book Fool Moon

Source: Fool Moon

Dance, Training, Clothes

“If you come, you better come in force because I will kill every single one of you. My hand won't shake, my aim won't falter. My face will be the last thing you'll see before you die." I jammed my knife into the table and walked out.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: Magic Bleeds

“Table talk and Lovers' talk equally elude the grasp; Lovers' Talk is clouds, Table Talk is smoke."

Les Miserables”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

Lovers

“And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.”

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet

Guilt and Sorrow, st. 41 (1791-1794) Section XLI.
Context: And oft I thought (my fancy was-so strong)
That I, at last, a resting-place had found:
'Here: will I dwell,' said I,' my whole life long,
Roaming the illimitable waters round;
Here will I live, of all but heaven disowned.
And end my days upon the peaceful flood—
To break my dream the vessel reached its bound;
And homeless near a thousand homes I stood,
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food.

Food, Home

“You don't get it boy… this isn't a mudhole… its an operating table. (KRAKKKKK) And I'm the surgeon.”

Frank Miller The Dark Knight Returns

Source: Batman: The Dark Knight Returns

Boy

“I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas - fat, drugged, and completely out of it.”

Anthony Bourdain (1956–2018) Chef and food writer

Feeling

“You want a round table meeting, we can have a round table meeting."
"I love round tables," said Magnus brightly. "They suit me so much better than square.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

Love

“We have some nachos left.” Carlos motioned to a plate on the table. “But I don’t suppose you’re interested.”
“I already ate.” Ian sat at the end of the table.
“Anyone we know?” Carlos’s amber eyes twinkled. “Ouch.” He glared at Toni.”

Kerrelyn Sparks (1955) American writer

Source: All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire

“Woe betide the leaders now perched on their dizzy pinnacles of triumph if they cast away at the conference table what the soldiers had won on a hundred bloodsoaked battlefields.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: Memoirs of the Second World War

“When the girl sitting at the next table looked away from a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Girl, Coffee

“I'm sitting at the dinner table, wearing my future mother-in-law's underwear. It's like some twisted dream that you wake up and thinkL Crikey Moses! Thank God that didn't really happen!”

Sophie Kinsella book I've Got Your Number

Source: I've Got Your Number

God, Law, Dreams, Future

“I could no more have stopped myself from feeling that sadness than you could stop yourself from smelling an apple that has been cut open on the table before you.”

Arthur Golden book Memoirs of a Geisha

Source: Memoirs of a Geisha

Sadness, Feeling

“People will buy anything at jumble sales,' I said. 'At the Evacuated Children Charity Fair a woman bought a tree branch that had fallen on the table.”

Connie Willis book To Say Nothing of the Dog

Source: To Say Nothing of the Dog

Children, People, Tree

“A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy?”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Happiness, Happy, Cute

“This letter is written on the skin of one of the water sprites who drowned your parents.'
'Ick!' I cried, and dropped the letter on the kitchen table.”

Charlaine Harris Dead in the Family

Source: Dead in the Family

Parent, Water

“Bruises mapped my body from bumping into tables and tripping over curbs while walking with a book in my hand, my eyes focused on the pages instead of the live space around me.”

Rachel Cohn (1968) American writer

Source: You Know Where to Find Me

Books

“Do they always flirt with biblical quotes?" Asil asked Tad.

In long-suffering tones, Tad said, "They can flirt with the periodic table or a restaurant menu. We've learned to live with it. Get a room you guys.”

Patricia Briggs book Frost Burned

Source: Frost Burned

Guy, Quotes, Suffering, Learning

“A kid under a tablecloth insists he’s a ghost. A table
underneath a tablecloth is, I guess, like the rest of us,
only pretending to be invisible.”

Richard Siken (1967) American poet

“All I can think of is the emaciated bodies of children on our kitchen table as my mother prescribes what the parent's can't give. More food.”

Suzanne Collins book Catching Fire

Source: Catching Fire

Children, Food, Thinking, Parent

“It is the good children, Madame, who make the most terrible revolutionaries. They say nothing, they do not hide under the table, they eat only one sweet at a time, but later on, they make Society pay dearly for it!”

Jean Paul Sartre Dirty Hands

Jessica, Act 3, sc. 1
Dirty Hands (1948)

Children, Time

“It's okay," said Adrian breezily. He rested his arm casually on the table. "I don't really need a job or extra money. After Rose and I get married, the kids and I'll just live off of her guardian paycheck.”

Richelle Mead book Spirit Bound

Source: Spirit Bound

Money

“The kitchen was just as empty, even the refrigerator gone, the chairs, the table--the kitchen cabinets stood open, their bare shelves reminder her of a nursery rhyme. She cleared her throat. "What would demons," she said, "want with our microwave?”

Cassandra Clare book City of Bones

Source: City of Bones

“He [Iggy] started reaching for things around the table, and his hand landed on Total. “You’re black.”
“I prefer canine-American,” said Total.”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Final Warning

“Sleep every chance you get. Eat every chance you get. Those were two of the many lessons that Kat learned at her father’s knee and her uncle’s table.”

Ally Carter (1974) American writer

Source: Perfect Scoundrels

Sleep, Learning, Chance

“Some morning while your eating breakfast and you need something new to think about, though, you might want to ponder the fact that you see your kids across the table not as they are but as they once were, about three nanoseconds ago.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Source: Death by Black Hole - And Other Cosmic Quandaries

Thinking

“With a sigh she reached into her pocket and drew out a small velvet bag, which upended on the table. Two gold rings fell out, landing with a soft clink. Simon looked at them puzzled. "You want to get married?”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

“One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) French writer (1821–1880)

“Fame is a fickle food
Upon a shifting plate,
Whose table once a Guest, but not
The second time, is set.
Whose crumbs the crows inspect,
And with ironic caw
Flap past it to the Farmer’s corn;
Men eat of it and die.”

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) American poet

The Single Hound, p. 257
Collected Poems (1993)

Men, Food, Time, Past

“If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

Shirley Chisholm (1924–2005) American politician

“He fell off the table like a crab looking for the sea.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

Sea

“The most stable elements, Clarice, appear in the middle of the periodic table, roughly between iron and silver.

Between iron and silver. I think that is appropriate for you.”

Thomas Harris book Hannibal

Source: Hannibal

Thinking, Appearance

“Please don't worry. It's a psychological complaint, common amongst ex-librarians. You see, she thinks she's a coffee table edition…”

Alan Moore book Batman: The Killing Joke

Source: Batman: The Killing Joke

Coffee, Thinking

“It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd.”

Penelope Lively (1933) British novelist

Lying

“And I suddenly think, as I look across the table at him, that these are the days as they will be. This is the future as we see it. The swerve and the static. The confidence and the doubt.”

Colum McCann book Let the Great World Spin

Source: Let the Great World Spin

Confidence, Thinking, Future

“Evil is an act, not an appetite. How many haven't wanted to slash the throat of some boor across the dining room table? Present company excepted of course. Everyone has the appetite. If you give in to it, it, that act is evil. The appetite is normal.”

Gregory Maguire book Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Source: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

Evil

“Sometimes a crumb falls
From the tables of joy,
Sometimes a bone
Is flung.

To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven.”

Langston Hughes (1902–1967) American writer and social activist

Love, People, Joy

“Barbarism? That's ironic coming from a woman helping to prepare us for slaughter. And what's she basing our success on? Our table manners?”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Success, Help

“A girl in a bikini is like having a loaded gun on your coffee table- There's nothing wrong with them, but it's hard to stop thinking about.”

Garrison Keillor (1942) American radio host and writer

Girl, Coffee, Thinking

“I hate this shallow Americanism which hopes to get rich by credit, to get knowledge by raps on midnight tables, to learn the economy of the mind by phrenology, or skill without study, or mastery without apprenticeship.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Hate, Hope, Knowledge, Study

“And our problems will crumble apart, the soul / blow through like a wind, and here where we live
will all be clean again, with fresh bread on the table.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

Soul, Problem

“The great motherhood friendships are the ones in which two women can admit [how difficult mothering is] quietly to each other, over cups of tea at a table sticky with spilled apple juice and littered with markers without tops.”

Anna Quindlen (1952) journalist, Novelist

Women, Friendship, Tea

“Never sit a table when you can stand at the bar.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

“Many undoubtedly owe their good fortune to the circumstance that they possess a pleasing smile with which they win hearts. Yet these hearts would do better to beware and to learn from Hamlet's tables that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) German philosopher

Source: Essays and Aphorisms

Smile, Learning, Heart

“Anyway that other thing we almost did in Paris-that's probably off the table for a while. Unless you want that whole baby-I'm-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Kiss, Baby

“You know the law, Dresden."
"He who kills the cheer springs for beer," chanted the rest of the table.”

Jim Butcher book Backup

Source: Backup

Law, Spring, Beer

“Mattie sat at the table, obsessing, orbiting around herself. She was sick of her worried, hostile mind. It would have killed her long before, she felt, if it hadn't needed the transportation.”

Anne Lamott (1954) Novelist, essayist, memoirist, activist

Source: Blue Shoe

Hostility

“You never get mad,” she said when their server left the table. “Except at me.”
“That’s not true,” he said tightly. “Torie can get me going.”
“Torie doesn’t count. You were obviously her mother in a previous life.”

Susan Elizabeth Phillips (1948) American writer

Source: Call Me Irresistible

Life, Madness

“We don’t need a list of rights and wrongs, tables of dos and don’ts: we need books, time, and silence. is soon forgotten, butlasts forever.”

Philip Pullman (1946) English author

Books, Silence, Time

“I shall keep my book on the table here, and read a little every morning as soon as I wake, for I know it will do me good, and help me through the day.”

Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) American novelist

Books, Reading, Help

“Just because something's damaged doesn't mean it shouldn't be treated with respect.'

'Ad,' Wallace said, 'it's a coffee table, not an orphan.”

Sarah Dessen book Along for the Ride

Source: Along for the Ride

Coffee

“They found me at the kitchen table. Derek said, "There's something we need to tell you," and from the look on Andrew's face, I think he expected Derek to say he'd gotten me pregnant.”

Kelley Armstrong The Reckoning

Source: The Reckoning

Thinking

“Basil Stag Hare tut-tutted severely as he remarked to Ambrose Spike, 'Tch, tch. Dreadful table manners. Just look at those three wallahs, kicking up a hullaballoo like that! Eating's a serious business.”

Brian Jacques Redwall

Source: Redwall

Business

“At the small table, sitting very upright, was one of the ugliest old ladies he had ever seen. It was an ugliness of distinction - it fascinated rather than repelled.”

Agatha Christie book Murder on the Orient Express

Source: Murder on the Orient Express

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.”

T.S. Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
Source: Selected Poems

“Because when I looked at you across that table at the diner, no one else existed. And whether or not anything happens between you and me, it took meeting you to show me what I was missing.”

Jessica Bird book Covet

Source: Covet

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, I Have A Dream (1963)
Source: I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World
Context: Let us not wallow in the valley of despair. I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state, sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.

Dreams

“I still don't get it" Coach Hedge muttered as they roamed the centre aisle. "They named a whole town after Leo's table?"
"I think the town was here first, Coach" Nico said.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Thinking

“A society's competitive advantage will come not from how well its schools teach the multiplication and periodic tables, but from how well they stimulate imagination and creativity.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

School, Imagination

“He trailed off as he saw the books. Piles and stacks of them beside the sofa, another stack on the coffee table, a sea of them on her dining table.
Jesus Christ, Dane, you need treatment.”

Nora Roberts (1950) American romance writer

Books, Coffee, Christ, Sea

“But give me more credit than that. Someone else may have dealt the hand, but I picked it up off the table, I played every card, and I had my reasons.”

Tana French book The Likeness

Source: The Likeness

“It's really not that hard to put food on the table if that's what you decide to do.”

Jeannette Walls book The Glass Castle

Source: The Glass Castle

Food

“When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.”

Sherman Alexie book The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993)

People, Hope, Beer

“Soldering things together, putting the chips together, designing them, drawing them on drafting tables — it was so much a passion in my life. And to this day, I'll go stay at the bottom of the org chart being an engineer, because that's where I want to be.”

Steve Wozniak (1950) American inventor, computer engineer and programmer

Steve Wozniak Debunks One of Apple's Biggest Myths - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJif4i9NRdI Bloomberg Business interview (2014)

Life, Passion, Drawing

“Questioner: Why do you continue to support a Nazi policy as Obama has expressly supported this policy? Why are you supporting it?
Frank: When you ask me that question I am gonna revert to my ethnic heritage and answer your question with a question: On what planet do you spend most of your time? […] As you stand there with a picture of the President defaced to look like Hitler, and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis, my answer to you is, as I said before, it is a tribute to the First Amendment that this kind of vile, contemptible nonsense is so freely propagated. Ma'am, trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table: I have no interest in doing it.”

Barney Frank (1940) American politician, former member of the House of Representatives for Massachusetts

Response to questioner at a town-meeting in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, broadcast on CNN (18 August 2009); YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGX-2oTNens.

Health, Question, Support, Effort

“The investigation of the form and brightness of the rings or rays surrounding the image of a star as seen in a good telescope, when a diaphragm bounded by a rectilinear contour is placed upon the object-glass, though sometimes tedious is never difficult. The expressions which it is necessary to integrate are always sines and cosines of multiples of the independent variable, and the only trouble consists in taking properly the limits of integration. Several cases of this problem have been completely worked out, and the result, in every instance, has been entirely in accordance with observation. These experiments… have seldom been made except by those whose immediate object was to illustrate the undulatory theory of light. There is however a case of a somewhat different kind; which in practice recurs perpetually, and which in theory requires for its complete investigation the value of a more difficult integral; I mean the usual case of an object-glass with a circular aperture. The desire of submitting to mathematical investigation every optical phænomenon of frequent occurrence has induced me to procure the computation of the numerical values of the integral that presents itself in this inquiry: and I now beg leave to lay before the Society the calculated table, with a few remarks upon its application.”

George Biddell Airy (1801–1892) English mathematician and astronomer

Star, Mathematics, Problem, Light

Quotes about table page 2

Quotes about table
page 2