Showing 10 of 14 quotes
One can never be sure whether a very early memory is a real memory or just the recollection of something which you were told happened. ”
When I was three, my father was three. When I was six, he was six... he needed me to escape from being 50. ”
My father did not drink beer. He said he didn't like the taste, and I was prepared to accept that I wouldn't like the taste either. So I stuck to bottled cider. ”
In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son. ”
I like to have around me the things I like today, not the things I once liked many years ago. ”
War and love - they have much in common. You can theorize about them, but until you have experienced them, you cannot know them, for the emotions that they engender are as complicated and as conflicting, as noble and as ignoble, as any that life has to offer. ”
I live at the bottom of a valley. I have a small bookshop in a small town, and I seldom venture far afield. ”
Mathematics is like music. Neither needs to be useful. It is enough that each gives delight to those who seek delight from it. ”
Fractions, decimals, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, mechanics - these are the steps up the mountain side. How high is one going to get? For me, the pinnacle was Projective Geometry. Who today has even heard of this branch of mathematics? ”
If I seem to write most happily about the ordinary things that boys do who live in the country, it is because this is the part of my childhood that I look back upon with the greatest affection. ”