Catalogues Quotes

Mathematics catalogues everything that is not self-contradictory; within that vast inventory, physics is an island of structures rich enough to contain their own beholders. ~ Greg Egan

I thought Out of Action was better as a catalogue than the honeycomb because the honeycomb was like walking into one compartment and then another compartment. ~ Richard Serra

Old books, yes! They are the true comforters; and principally because they are old and familiar. Many excellent new tales and poems and dramas are added yearly to the catalogues, and and some of these in time will stand beside the great companions under discussion; but only Time (and you and I and all other lovers of good books) will bring about their survival. ~ Vincent Starrett

Love cannot be reduced to a catalogue of reasons why, and a catalogue of reasons cannot be put together into love. ~ Eleanor Catton

People with Asperger's couldn't control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn mower catalogues. ~ Michael Lewis

The Metropolitan Museum has all of our collections online, all our scholarly publications and catalogues since 1965. We have online features like the timeline of art history. ~ Thomas P. Campbell

I was given the opportunity to write the kind of book that I wanted to write, rather than one that catalogues where I sang and what I sang and what I wore. I wanted to write a book about an American family, the family that has produced me. The longer I live, the more I realise the incredible support and love we were given as children. ~ Jessye Norman

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. Philosophy will clip an angel's wings. ~ John Keats

Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'.
Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory. ~ Catherynne M Valente

She once used me with that insolence, that in revenge I took her to pieces; sifted her, and separated her failings; I studied 'em, and got 'em by rote. The catalogue was so large, that I was not without hopes, one day or other to hate her heartily. ~ William Congreve

It's apparent that we can't proceed any further without a name for this institutionalized garrulousness, this psychological patter, this need to catalogue the ego's condition. Let's call it psychobabble, this spirit which now tyrannizes conversation in the seventies. ~ Richard Rosen

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten. ~ Henry Adams

Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as truly as catalogues and encyclopedias. ~ Bertrand Russell

Our admiration of a famous man lessens upon our nearer acquaintance with him; and we seldom hear of a celebrated person without a catalogue of some notorious weaknesses and infirmities. ~ Joseph Addison

I try to write songs. At our concerts, we take the cream of the crop from my back catalogue and I don't know if I could write something now that would replace any of that. We don't lose any of the standards. We have lots of songs in rotation. ~ Gordon Lightfoot

When you have made a catalogue of your friend's faults it is only fair to supply him with a duplicate, so that he may know yours. ~ Ambrose Bierce

In genealogy you might say that interest lies in the eye of the gene holder. The actual descendants are far more intrigued with it all than the listeners, who quickly sink into a narcoleptic coma after the second or third great-great-somebody kills a bear or beheads Charles I, invents the safety pin or strip-mines Poland, catalogues slime molds, dances flamenco, or falls in love with a sheep. Genealogy is a forced march through stories. Yet everyone loves stories, and that is one reason we seek knowledge of our own blood kin.
Through our ancestors we can witness their times. Or, we think, there might be something in their lives, an artist's or a farmer's skill, an affection for a certain landscape, that will match or explain something in our own. If we know who they were, perhaps we will know who we are. And few cultures have been as identity-obsessed as ours. So keen is this fascination with ancestry, genealogy has become an industry. Family reunions choke the social calendar. Europe crawls with ancestor-seeking Americans. Your mother or your spouse or your neighbors are too busy to talk to you because they are on the Internet running "heritage quests." We have climbed so far back into our family trees, we stand inches away from the roots where the primates dominate. ~ Ellen Meloy

It looked like the sort of book described in library catalogues as 'slightly foxed', although it would be more honest to admit that it looked as though it had been badgered, wolved and possibly beared as well. ~ Terry Pratchett

I want to keep my life as unfettered as possible. So maybe I'll just pretend to get rare books from my catalogue, and not really get them. ~ Patti Smith

Massive changes may have occurred in libraries in recent years, with new digital resources and services supplementing the old traditional resources and services, the dog-eared card catalogues ripped up and destroyed, workstations suddenly everywhere, but one essential aspect of "libraryness" has not changed: libraries remain places dedicated to storage. Books continue to be published in greater and greater numbers – so great in fact that there are no accurate figures as to exactly how many are published: some say one every thirty seconds, others four thousand per day, others a million per year – and somehow, whether through the off-site storage of the physical books themselves, or microfilm copying, or digital scanning, we remain obliged to keep up with or afloat in this vast deluge of paper. Even the new, high-tech rebranded libraries opened to great fanfare in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in the 1990s could not get away from this essential fact of paper hoarding: they were called "Idea Stores." - p.56 ~ Ian Sansom

The point is that everyone needs some exposure to the various ways of life. People buy things out of catalogues too much. They see in Time magazine that they're suppose to be feeling in such and such a way, and they dash off a check and buy that life-style sight unseen. A pig in a poke if there ever was one, for once you've bought the thing there's no refund. We ought to be able to try things before we sign up for them. Used to be you could listen to the records in a record store before you bought them. Now they're sealed, for your protection, they say. Bullshit! It's for their goddamned protection, not ours. We don't need to be protected. We need to be allowed to get a taste of something before we accept it. ~ Arthur Alexander

October is a fine and dangerous season in America. a wonderful time to begin anything at all. You go to college, and every course in the catalogue looks wonderful. ~ Thomas Merton

Rooms, corridors, bookcases, shelves, filing cards, and computerized catalogues assume that the subjects on which our thoughts dwell are actual entities, and through this assumption a certain book may be lent a particular tone and value. Filed under Fiction, Jonathon Swift's Gulliver's Travels is a humorous novel of adventure; under Sociology, a satirical study of England in the eighteenth century; under Children's Literature, an entertaining fable about dwarfs and giants and talking horses; under Fantasy, a precursor of science fiction; under Travel, an imaginary voyage; under Classics, a part of the Western literary canon. Categories are exclusive; reading is not--or should not be. Whatever classifications have been chosen, every library tyrannizes the act of reading, and forces the reader--the curious reader, the alert reader--to rescue the book from the category to which it has been condemned. ~ Alberto Manguel

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing. ~ Howard Hodgkin

I mean, what is this life of ours supposed to be for? Are we to spend it identifying each other with catalogues, like tourists in an art gallery? Or are we to try to exchange some kind of a signal, however garbled, before it's too late? ~ Christopher Isherwood

Martin Buber as described for basic virtues cultivated by the Hasidim to overcome the separation of the sacred and secular. . . . St. Benedict spoke of them as truly seeking God, zeal for a humble way of life, zeal for obedience, and zeal for the opus of God. Buber catalogues them as kavana (single-mindedness), shiflut (humility), avada (service), and hitlahavut (fire of ecstasy). 129 ~ M. Basil Pennington

My younger years of modeling were really just filled with fun trips. I was doing catalogues for Alexander's and Bloomingdale's. ~ Brooke Shields

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders. ~ Winston Churchill

You alone in Europe are not ancient oh Christianity
The most modern European is you Pope Pius X
And you whom the windows observe shame keeps you
From entering a church and confessing this morning
You read the prospectuses the catalogues the billboards that sing aloud
That's the poetry this morning and for the prose there are the newspapers
There are the 25 centime serials full of murder mysteries
Portraits of great men and a thousand different headlines
("Zone") ~ Guillaume Apollinaire

As a child, recognizing my difference from other kids, I went to the local public library to try to better understand my reality. Back then, many library card catalogues didn't even list 'homosexuality' as a topic. ~ James McGreevey

There are two seasonal diversions that can ease the bite of any winter. One is the January thaw. The other is the seed catalogues. ~ Hal Borland

'Sherlock' fans are, by and large, an intelligent breed, so they've gone through my back catalogue and got what I've done, why and how I've done it. There is some obsessive behaviour, but I worry for them rather than me. ~ Benedict Cumberbatch

Then about 12 years ago it dawned on me that folk music - the music of Woody Guthrie and Phil Ochs, early Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Pete Seeger - could be as heavy as anything that comes through a Marshall stack. The combination of three chords and the right lyrical couplet can be as heavy as anything in the Metallica catalogue. ~ Tom Morello

There's a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politcians' speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be 'inspired' in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art - so much that I'd try and make it for myself. ~ Sara Baume

No catalogue of horrors ever kept men from war. Before the war you always think that it's not you that dies. But you will die, brother, if you go to it long enough. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Taste. You cannot buy such a rare and wonderful thing. You can't send away for it in a catalogue. And I'm afraid it's becoming obsolete. ~ Rosalind Russell

Once I had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: No good in a bed, but fine up against a wall. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski. ~ James R Newman

This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things - fish and unicorns and men on horseback - but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on. ~ Stephen King

You must remember garden catalogues are as big liars as house-agents. ~ Rumer Godden

There are things that happen so quickly. A better cameraman can capture them, but if the light is not bright and you hoist up your camera by the time you've dialed in your settings. there are eye blink moments where you're like "Aaahhhh, I wish," but those are too many to catalogue. Nothing really sticks out. ~ Henry Rollins

When I was very, very young, I decided that I was gonna catalogue my times because that's what other people who I admired did. That's what Bob Dylan did, that's what Frank Sinatra did, Hank Williams did, in very different ways. ~ Bruce Springsteen

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf's below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows' legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo's sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies. ~ China Mieville

We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they're frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we're already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we're not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you're making products that people don't need, you're at the mercy of the economy, you're at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation. ~ Yvon Chouinard

Men who tell you they read the Ann Summers catalogue for the articles are lying ~ Rita Rudner

Things that need to be dealt with right away. This might include correspondence from his office or business associates, bills, legal documents, and the like. He subsequently performed a fine sort of things to be dealt with today versus in the next few days. Things that are important but can wait. We called this the abeyance pile. This might include investment reports that needed to be reviewed, articles he might want to read, reminders for periodic service on an automobile, invitations to parties or functions that were some time off in the future, and so on. Things that are not important and can wait, but should still be kept. This was mostly product catalogues, holiday cards, and magazines. Things to be thrown out. ~ Daniel J. Levitin

I must confess that I'm not a great reader. At the moment I'm reading my son's 'Stig of the Dump' by Clive King and I've got a plant catalogue on the go. ~ Sophie Thompson

We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies. ~ Lewis Thomas

I never thought I was cut out for a life of crime. I even felt guilty when I accidentally stole a Subbuteo catalogue, thinking it was free. But everyone has an inner rebel, and mine has finally found a natural outlet. My crime of choice is that, with a heart as cold as ice and no care for what society thinks, I steal wireless computer network time. ~ Julian Baggini

Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The astronomer who catalogues the stars cannot add one atom to the universe; the poet can call an universe from the atom. ~ Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

The I-Remember-Whensters lumbered in with their musty catalogues of the bygone, dragging IVs of distilled nostalgia behind them on creaky wheels, ~ Colson Whitehead

Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing-with each species in its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science, dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos. ~ Stephen Jay Gould

The main thing is healthy eating, exercise, which I do for special events, like if it's Sports Illustrated, or the swim suit catalogue for Victoria's Secret, or my own calendar that I did for the year 2000. ~ Heidi Klum

If you don't synthesize knowledge, scientific journals become spare-parts catalogues for machines that are never built. ~ Arthur R. Marshall

Don't be surprised if in the 21st century lectures on meditation appear in university catalogues for physics. ~ Gary Zukav

There's a whole catalogue of actors that never went to acting school. ~ Dennis Farina

What is our policy? ... to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. ~ Winston Churchill

The nature of touring is packaging acts together that have strong catalogues of music. It's about making sure that it's a winning combination. It's really about giving people value for their money. ~ Vivian Campbell