Previous Quotes of the Week

5th January, 2002

Goddess of song, teach me the story of a hero.

First line of Homer's Odyssey

12th January, 2002

Give up owning things and being somebody. Quit existing.

Jelaluddin Rumi

20th January, 2002

Why is it that Death is the only one who knows what he's doing?

Roger McGough

28th January, 2002

Film producer: Sit down please Miss West.

Mae West: I'll sit when I've finished standing!

6th February, 2002

Only a fool looks for wisdom in the ventricles of the human heart.

Coen Brothers

10th February, 2002

Posture is a journey, not a destination.

Simon Pentry - one of my clients

16th February, 2002

Listening to the radio
I feel so out of place
There's a certain something missing
That the treble can't erase.

Addicted to Bass - Puretone

23rd February, 2002

Yesterday don't matter
'Cause it's gone.

Ruby Tuesday - The Stones

10th March, 2002

CONTROL : "To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him."

Shunryu Suzuki

18th March, 2002

Governments, like nappies, should be changed regularly - and for the same reason.

Italian saying

24th March, 2002

Alicia Nash : Garbage men don't call at night.
John Nash : Maybe they do round here.

A Beautiful Mind

8th April, 2002

It's all been a big cock up.
One day I was just playing and the next day I was booked up for the next two years.
I hate the cello if you want to know.

Jacqueline Du Pré

19th April, 2002

I walk through the garden of truth, sniggering all the way.

Voltaire

30th April, 2002

To fly - the dream of men and flightless birds for centuries.

Colonel Ramatov

8th May, 2002

You say I must write another book? But I've just written this one.
You liked it so much that's the reason? Read it again then.

Stevie Smith

20th May, 2002

Trying is the first step towards failure.

Homer Simpson

5th June, 2002

Please send me some more money.

Vincent Van Gogh - 1888

12th June, 2002

Every morning camels spread their piteous-sounding cries over the vast plains of the Gobi desert. The moving moos of camels bring Mongols to tears, while the Mongols' khuur-play can bring camels to tears.
Here the khuur renders the camelmoose, preceded by the rather shaky camel trot. Beware, this mutual tearjerker may do you brown, too!

Sleeve note from Mongolian music CD

19th June, 2002

Woman phoning chat show : Every time I see a gasometer I want to put a daffodil on top of it.
Chat show host : That's interesting, because every time I see a daffodil I want to put a gasometer under it.

Radio 4

30th June, 2002

If you believe that money can't buy happiness you're shopping at all the wrong places.

Guest on Radio Chat Show

6th July, 2002

In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel.
If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

12th July, 2002

September fattens on vines. Roses
flake from the wall. The smoke
of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

Geoffrey Hill

20th July, 2002

It is not true
That death begins after life.
When life stops
Death also stops.

Gösta Ågren

28th July, 2002

It is forbidden to walk on the grass
But it is not forbidden to fly over the grass.

Augusto Boal

2nd August, 2002

Don't keep blaming yourself.
Just blame yourself once and move on.

Homer Simpson

10th August, 2002

But you don't reach sanctuary just by looking at the sky.

Emmylou Harris

26th August, 2002

The dead do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us.
They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around.
They are victims of love, many of them.

Anne Carson

8th September, 2002

and I see a woman, shining, stretch her hand
and shake as she receives the gift of weeping;

Les Murray

27th September, 2002

Be not too hard - for soon he dies,
Often no wiser than he began;
Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man.

Christoper Logue

5th October, 2002

I dwell in possibility.

Emily Dickinson

18th October, 2002

Use your faults; use your defects.
They will make you a star.

Edith Piaf

6th November, 2002

You can tell the sun
In his jealous sky
That we walked in fields of gold.

Fields of Barley : Trad. song.

14th November, 2002

I can remember much forgetfulness.

Hart Crane

26th November, 2002

Bury the hatchet
But not too deep in my head.

Dr. John

14th December, 2002

As people get older they define themselves by what they don't like.
Why can't we be who we are instead of who we aren't?

Elizabeth Bowen

4th January, 2003

All knowledge is a borrowing and every fact a debt.

Cormac Mc Carthy

11th January, 2003

Who has two legs must wash two knees.

Wendy Cope

25th January, 2003

You can't have a war against terrorism without becoming a terrorist yourself.
All over we see that terrorism is the war of the poor and war is the terrorism of the rich, so really there is no difference between the two.

Sir Peter Ustinov

4th February, 2003

"Good-morning, good-morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of them dead,
And are cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both with his plan of attack.

The General - Siegfried Sassoon

13th February, 2003

The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.

Vidal Sassoon

19th February, 2003

The theatre I worked at last week - the act before me was so bad they were still booing while I was on.

Ken Dodd

4th March, 2003

Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me.

Sigmund Freud

8th March, 2003

Never drive a car when you're dead.

Tom Waits

23rd March, 2003

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

Albert Einstein

5th April, 2003

You have to learn how to push the rock where it wants to go.

Tanouye Tenshin Roshi

16th April, 2003

It's not a trick, your senses all deceiving,
A fitful dream the morning will exhaust.
Say goodbye to Alexander leaving,
Then say goodbye to Alexander lost.

Leonard Cohen

26th April, 2003

You have to kiss a lot of toads before you find a frog.

Lucy Bain

9th May, 2003

Never trust a man who, left alone in a room with a tea cosy, doesn't try it on.

Billy Connolly

17th May, 2003

Children play to encounter reality:
Adults play to avoid it.

Janet Moyles

25th May, 2003

If you don't know where you're going
Any road will take you there.

George Harrison

9th June, 2003

If there's no room for laughter,
There's no room for me.

Steve Harley

19th June, 2003

Me "Do you sell bolts?"
Assistant at MachineMart "No Sir. For bolts you must go to the bolt supplier."

18th Sepember, 2003

I believe that much of a man's character will be found betokened in his backbone.
I would rather feel your spine than your skull, whoever you are.

Herman Melville - Moby Dick

28th September, 2003

She was right.
I should have loved her.

Tony Parsons - Man and Boy

21st October,2003

Well, I wrestled with reallity for 35 years Doctor,
and I'm glad to say that I finally won out over it.

James Stewart in "Harvey"

28th October, 2003

When it comes to emotions
even great heroes can be idiots.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

11th November, 2003

Words gave her clarity,
Brought reason, shape.
Whereas I thought words bent emotions,
like sticks in water.

Michael Ondaatje

18th November, 2003

For echo is the soul of the voice
Exciting itself in hollow places.

Michael Ondaatje

25th November, 2003

Today as I lie here in my mental hospital,
I often regret the power I had in those days
to project my voice through the wintery night
to thaw frost flowers on glass,
cut holes in shop windows,
and show thieves the way.

Günter Grass - The Tin Drum

7th December, 2003

Life was invented by water
As a means of transporting itself
Across dry places.

Tom Robbins

21st December, 2003

Energy rightly applied and directed will accomplish anything.

Nellie Bly

30th December, 2003

A policy of an eye for an eye will lead the whole world into blindness.

Mahatma Gandi

6th January, 2004

I was a human being before I was a human doing.

Cover of a CD in Leeds Library

17th January, 2004

An electron proceeding through space and time
meets an energetic photon, absorbs it, and is scattered
backwards in time until it emits an energetic photon
and recoils in such a way that it moves forward in time again.
Instead of three particles, two electrons and a photon
in a complicated dance, we have one particle, one electron
that zigzags its way through space and time,
colliding with photons here and there along the way.

John Gribbin - In Search of Schrödingers Cat

22nd January, 2004

I never make predictions, and I never will.

Paul Gascoigne

7th February, 2004

A woman who sacrifices her life for her children
does them no favours,
for she burdens them with a life unlived.

Rainer Maria Rilke

14th February, 2004

It's not enough to succeed.
Others must fail.

Gore Vidal

22nd February, 2004

It is good to have an end to journey toward;
but it is the journey that matters, in the end.

Ursula K. LeGuin

29th February, 2004

There's no point in direction.

Peter Gabrial - Beyond the Flood

6th March, 2004

Testing the warm milk
on her wrist, she beams - nice, but
her son is forty.

David M. Bader - Jewish Haikus

18th March, 2004

The reasonable man changes himself to suit the circumstances.
The unreasonable man changes the circumstances to suit himself.
Therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable men.

George Bernard Shaw

25th March, 2004

Follow your heart
Not the voices in your head.

Marge Simpson (Voted Mother of the Year)

10th April, 2004

The cemetery on the island of San Michele is so beautiful that some visitors to Venice have committed suicide solely in order to be buried there.

Venetian guide book

17th April, 2004

For there is nothing,
Neither good nor bad,
But that thinking makes it so.

Hamlet - William Shakespeare

26th April, 2004

If you can't lower heaven,
Raise hell.

Sign in shop window.

4th May, 2004

Interrogator : Are all bottled waters the same?
Suspect : The best bottled water comes from Japan.
They find the purest, bluest icebergs, tow them back and bottle them.
The water hasn't been in liquid form for 30,000 years.
Interrogator : What does it taste like?
Suspect : Water.

Kiss the Girls - Hollywood Movie

11th May, 2004

Argue for your limitations, and sure enough they're yours.

Richard Bach (Suggested by Domonic Walton)

16th May, 2004

Education is the noble pursuit of leisure.

Aristotle

25th May, 2004

Endeavour to live your life in such a way that even the undertaker is sad when you die.

Mark Twain

29th May, 2004

Freedom comes when you learn to let go.
Creation comes when you learn to say "No".

Madonna

6th June, 2004

.....but the Alexander Technique is the worst.
For that one, you have to conquer half of Europe before you're thirty.

Radio 4 comedy.

22nd June, 2004

In Sierra Leone he visits mass graves and torture sites but also finds signs of some optimism when he meets the inspirational one-legged football team.

BBC2 Documentary by Ben Anderson

1st July, 2004

When a Christian
Falls down deid
He splits in two.
One halfs rotten
And so's the other.

Alan Jackson

4th July, 2004

The world's full of lovely and kind people and yet
It's always ruled by bastards.
I just don't understand it.

Robert Wyatt

15th July, 2004

I never cried until I was 30.
Now I cry every day.

John Peel

2nd August, 2004

zen and the inevitable destruction of capitalism

sitting quietly, doing nothing
spring comes
and capitalism destroys itself

Stephen Hancock

17th August, 2004

Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 percent of the dancing static you see is accounted for by the ancient remnants of the Big Bang.
The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the Universe.

Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

1st September, 2004

If the Earth were perfectly smooth, it would be covered everywhere with water to a depth of 4 kilometres.
There might be life in that lonesome ocean, but there certainly wouldn't be football.

Bill Bryson - A Short History of Nearly Everything

14th September, 2004

Somebody here is boring me.
I think it is me.

Dylan Thomas - very drunk at the time.

28th September, 2004

He'd use the skin of his mother to make a drum to sound his own praises.

Margot Asquith on Winston Churchill.

5th October, 2004

The first disaster is if you kill people.
The second disaster is if you cure them.

Dinyar Godrej in an essay about international drug companies

13th October, 2004

Given the choice
To sit out or to dance
I hope you dance.

Lian Womack

26th October, 2004

The loss of a child is an abyss
from which few families return.
Some claw their way again toward the light,
perhaps finding a narrow ledge where, in time,
memory can shed its skin of pain.
Others dwell in darkness forever.

Nicholas Evans

30th October,2004

Do you ken John Peel now he's far, far away.

Trad.

31st October,2004

Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.

John Maynard Keynes

16th November, 2004

The last leaf o' Winter fell today.
I imagine it fell wi' a thump.

Alan Jackson

20th November, 2004

I've spent a lot of money on booze, birds and drugs.
The rest I just wasted.

George Best

2nd December, 2004

Why stay still when you can move?
I can't see the point.

Alma Goodall

23rd December, 2004

I want you to burn this Judas of a body.
I don't want to be buried.
I've spent enough time lying down.

Frida Kahlo

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