Lyra S Oxford Quotes

Everything means something. ~ Philip Pullman

Jonathan Coe's genial, likeable novel can only be described as a kind of lit-prog-rock concept album ( ... ) Coe recreates the period with such loving accuracy that I frankly suspect him of having planted a secret microphone in the tin Oxford Mathematical Instruments box I carried around in my school days. ( ... ) (A)s always with Jonathan Coe, the sheer intelligent good nature that suffuses his work makes it a pleasure to read. ~ Peter Bradshaw

Oxford

It is well that there are palaces of peace
And discipline and dreaming and desire,
Lest we forget our heritage and cease
The Spirit's work - to hunger and aspire:

Lest we forget that we were born divine,
Now tangled in red battle's animal net,
Murder the work and lust the anodyne,
Pains of the beast 'gainst bestial solace set.

But this shall never be: to us remains
One city that has nothing of the beast,
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire's glutted feast.

We are not wholly brute. To us remains
A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,
A place of visions and of loosening chains,
A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.

She was not builded out of common stone
But out of all men's yearning and all prayer
That she might live, eternally our own,
The Spirit's stronghold - barred against despair. ~ C.S. Lewis

The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry. ~ C.S. Lewis

Our daughter's name Arwynn comes from Arwen in 'Lord of the Rings' because my wife and I met for the first time in the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis used to go to read out their stories to one another. ~ Adrian McKinty

Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead. ~ T. S. Eliot

(Referring to an obsession with Tolkien's Middle Earth): I meet a beautiful American heiress, I like her, she likes me . . . and then she turns out to be a fundamentalist with a more literal interpretation of scripture than I feel comfortable with. Only our bible was written by an Oxford don about sixty years ago. ~ S.M. Stirling

The word "snobbery" came into use for the first time in England during 1820s. It was said to have derived from the habit of many Oxford and Cambridge colleges of writing sine nobilitate (without nobility) , or "s.nob", next to the names of the ordinary students on examinations lists in order to distinguish them from their aristocratic peers. In the word's earliest days, a snob was taken to mean someone without high status, but it quickly assumed its modern and almost diametrically opposed meaning: someone offended by a lack of high status in others, a person who believes in a flawless equations between social rank and human worth ~ Alain De Botton

Arrive before your Husband. Not that I can
See quite what good arriving first will do;
But still arrive before him. When he's taken
His place upon the couch and you go too
To sit beside him, on your best behavior
Stealthily touch my foot, and look at me,
Watching my nods, my eyes, my face's language;
Catch and return my signals secretly.
I'll send a wordless message with my eyebrows;
You'll read my fingers' words, words traced in wine.
When you recall our games of love together,
Your finger on rosy cheeks must trace a line.
If in your silent thoughts you wish to chide me,
Let your hand hold the lobe of your soft ear;
When, darling, what I do or say gives pleasure,
Keep turning to an fro the ring you wear.
When you wish well-earned curses on your husband,
Lay your hand on the table, as in prayer.
If he pours you wine, watch out, tell him to drink it;
Ask for what you want from the waiter there.
I shall take next the glass you hand the waiter
And I'll drink from the place you took your sips;
If he should offer anything he's tasted,
Refuse whatever food has touch his lips.
Don't let him plant his arms upon your shoulders,
Don't let him rest your gentle head on his hard chest,
Don't let your dress, your breasts, admit his fingers,
And--most of all--no kisses to be pressed!
You kiss--and I'll reveal myself your lover;
I'll say 'they're mi ~ Ovid

I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do. ~ Jeanette Winterson

Who was that lad they used to try to make me read at Oxford? Ship- Shop- Schopenhauer. That's the name. A grouch of the most pronounced description. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. ~ Robert Darnton

Stories end in a rush. One minute, Will and Lyra are in love on their bench. The next they're in separate worlds. One minute the Pevensie's are kings and queens. The next, they're back through the wardrobe. One minute, the One ring is lava-dissolving in Gollum's hand, the next…well, that example doesn't work. The return of the king has like seven ending scenes, but for good reason. ~ Cory McCarthy

The greatest gift that Oxford gives her sons is, I truly believe, a genial irreverence toward learning, and from that irreverence love may spring. ~ Robertson Davies

For my Oxford degree, I had to translate French and German philosophy (as it turned out, Descartes and Kant) at sight without a dictionary. That meant Germany for my first summer vacation, to learn the thorny language on my own. ~ Paul Engle

There, eastward, within a stone's throw, stood the twin towers of All Souls, fantastic, unreal as a house of cards, clear-cut in the sunshine, the drenched oval in the quad beneath brilliant as an emerald in the bezel of a ring. Behind them, black and grey, New College frowning like a fortress, with dark wings wheeling about her belfry louvres; and Queen's with her dome of green copper; and, as the eye turned southward, Magdalen, yellow and slender, the tall lily of towers; the Schools and the battlemented front of University; Merton, square-pinnacled, half-hidden behind the shadowed North side and mounting spire of St. Mary's. Westward again, Christ Church, vast between Cathedral spire and Tom Tower; Brasenose close at hand; St. Aldate's and Carfax beyond; spire and tower and quadrangle, all Oxford springing underfoot in living leaf and enduring stone, ringed far off by her bulwark of blue hills. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and friends; he came from Oxford into the thick of advertised people; his name was mentioned in print six times a week before he had written a dozen articles. This kind of thing will become the rule. Men won't succeed in literature that they may get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in literature. ~ George Gissing

Not things, but opinions about things, trouble men. ~ Epictetus

It's called 'The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935'. They let a man named Yeats make the choosings. They shouldn't have. Who is he - and what does he know about verse?
I hunted through that book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. There weren't any - not one. And do you know why not? Because Mr Yeats said - he said, "I deliberately chose NOT to include any poems from World War I. I have a distaste for them. Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. ~ Mary Ann Shaffer

Economists use the word consume to mean "utilize economic goods," but the Shorter Oxford Dictionary's definition is more appropriate to ecologists: "To make away with or destroy; to waste or to squander; to use up." The economies that cater to the global consumer society are responsible for the lion's share of the damage that humans have inflicted on common global resources. ~ Alan Thein Durning

During the Cold War between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, there were, of course, many in the West who said, 'Better dead than Red [communist]'; but many others subscribed to the slogan associated with Bertrand Russell, the twentieth century's leading atheist philosopher: 'Better Red than dead.' Russell's slogan was consistent with that of much of the well-educated class in Britain. On February 8, 1933, right after Hitler came to power in Germany, the Oxford Union Debating Society held a debate on the resolution, 'This House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country.' The resolution passed 275–153. The vote made an impression on Hitler and Mussolini, as it revealed that many of England's best educated would prefer to live under Nazism or Fascism than to fight for freedom and risk death. ~ Dennis Prager

People would ask, "Why don't you put her in a nursing home?" I always answered, "I feel it is my responsibility, because she's my wife and Heather's mother. I love her and it's my job to take care of her for as long as I physically and mentally can."
Every day, I would rush home at lunch, prepare her something to eat and drive her around a little, too. She loved to ride in the car and that seemed to keep her smiling. By late October, she had really gone down. We were playing Ole Miss in Oxford, in a game that is probably best remembered for David Palmer replacing an injured Jay Barker and putting on a show that had Heisman voters buzzing.
Sadly, what I remember most was getting off the team plane and calling home. Charlotte didn't answer and I began to panic and started calling some of our neighbors. I finally reached one of the neighbors and she went to the house and found Charlotte just staring ahead. I don't think Charlotte ever answered the phone again. ~ Mal Moore With Steve Townsend

I at this writing am an old man, only three years short of my three score and ten. And they tell me that Wycliffe's bones have been dug up and burned and cast into the river that leads to the sea. The Church--she thinks--has had her revenge.
But, as I hear it, Wycliffe's writings had already touched one man in Bohemia, John Huss, whom the Church burned several years ago. And though both Wycliffe and Huss be dead, There are rumors of unrest in that small country, unrest caused by those who seek true religion.
In England, King Henry rules hand in glove with the Pope, but not forever, I think.
We are still here--the Lollards, I mean. Did you guess it? Yes, I have become a "poor priest." And I will tell you this: the writings of Wycliffe have been driven out of Oxford, but they can be found in every other nook in England. Indeed, many a time I have talked with an Oxford scholar on the road and have seen God open his heart to the truth.
This is what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of Christians as being pressed but never pinned. The Church rages, but the truth goes on. Many a stout English yeoman embraces it in these days and leads his family in true godly worship.
John Wycliffe was our morning star. When all was darkest and England lay asleep in the deadly arms of the papacy, God sent him to us. The Scripture has come to England. What will it hold back? Soon--though perhaps not in my lifetime-- the dawn will break, and there will be a new day in Engla ~ Andy Thomson

Mad' sounds dashing, daring and admirable when you hold the tattered flag in the midst of battle and expired natives lie all over the carpet with holes in 'em that you put there. 'Mad' is less impressive written on a form by a commissioner of lunacy as you're turned over to the hospitallers of St Mary of Bedlam to be dunked in ice water because your latest 'scrape' was running starkers down Oxford Street while gibbering like a baboon. ~ Kim Newman

I won a Marshall scholarship to read philosophy at Oxford, and what I most wanted to do was strengthen public intellectual culture - I'd write books and essays to help us figure out who we wanted to be. ~ Reid Hoffman

So, then, Oxford Street, stonyhearted stepmother, thou that listenest to the sighs of orphans, and drinkest the tears of children, at length I was dismissed from thee. ~ Thomas De Quincey

Visitors say, 'Real shrunken heads! Wow! How were they made? By slitting the skin, taking out the skull and brains and steaming them with hot sand? Gross!' But what no one asks is: how did they get here? What are they doing hanging up in a university museum in the south of England? Once you start to answer that question, you realize that shrunken heads like these are a product as much of European curiosity, European taste and European purchasing power as they are of an archaic tribal custom. It is time to turn the spotlight round and point it back at people like you and me, and at our ancestors, who were responsible for bringing hundreds of these heads into museums and people's homes and who delighted in them as much as -- if not more than -- the people who created them in the first place. After all, it is not the Shuar who are pressing their noses to the glass of an exhibition case in an Oxford University museum. ~ Frances Larson

The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day.
[Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.] ~ Richard Rhodes

Would physics at Geneva be as good as physics at Harvard? I think not. Rome? I think not. In Britain, I don't think there is one place, neither Cambridge nor Oxford, which can compare with Harvard. ~ Sheldon Lee Glashow

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad - into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. Om Mani padme hum - I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith

John's was not a glum, negative, insulting attack on society but a sharp-witted, entertaining, cock-a-snook approach that encouraged young people to express themselves as individuals and to reject the stifling rigidity of a lot of the older social traditions. Thanks to John, to give one example, regional dialects were no longer looked upon as a hindrance. He made no attempt to tone down his Liverpool accent (indeed, he exaggerated it) and this encouraged others to follow suit. Previously, without cut-glass Oxford English, it was impossible for anyone to make progress in the media. John changed all that, and a great deal more as well. (Desmond Morris) ~ Yoko Ono

There's something rather wonderful about the fact that Oxford is a very small city that contains most of the cultural and metropolitan facilities you could want, in terms of bookshops, theatre, cinema, conversation. But it's near enough to London to get here in an hour, and it's near enough to huge open spaces without which I would go insane. ~ Mark Haddon

Time is the only luxury. It's the only thing you can't get back. If you lose your luggage - I'm not gonna say the obvious brand of luggage that I'd normally say because I've got a meeting with them soon - if you lose your expensive luggage at the airport, you can get that back. You can't get the time back. ~ Kanye West

Keep behind me, Metatron - wait here - Asriel is suspicious - let me lull him first. When he's off guard, I'll call you. But come as a shadow, in this small form, so he doesn't see you - otherwise, he'll just let the child's daemon fly away. The Regent was a being whose profound intellect had had thousands of years to deepen and strengthen itself, and whose knowledge extended over a million universes. Nevertheless, at that moment he was blinded by his twin obsessions: to destroy Lyra and to possess her mother. He nodded and stayed where he was, while the woman and the monkey moved forward as quietly as they could. ~ Philip Pullman

When I first came to Oxford, I struggled to feel comfortable in an Anglican, public school-dominated institution. ~ Niall Ferguson

The west has decided to channel money and effort into studying other customs and practices, but no one has really given other people the chance to study western customs and practices, except at schools maintained by white expatriates, or by allowing the rich from other cultures to study in Oxford or Paris. What happens then is that they return home to organise fundamentalist movements, because they feel solidarity with those of their compatriots who lack the opportunity for such education. ~ Umberto Eco

I think - something I learned recently looking up the meaning of ideology. If you look in American encyclopedias, it says, you know, 'Rules for - basic rules for a system of economics or politics.' If you look in the Oxford, it says that, and then it says ... 'Despite - and people will hold these propositions despite events.' ~ Mario Cuomo

I had published a co-edited book with Oxford a decade ago, my first book actually. Years later I found myself having lunch with Lori Stone, who was an editor at Oxford at that time. We connected at a conference and over the course of lunch she told me about a wonderful new series she had just developed called Understanding Research. ~ Patricia Leavy

Sustainability requires that we demand enduring quality. Steve Strong has a slide presentation pointing out that much of Oxford was built 800 years ago. What are we building today that will be here 800 years from now? If something like that emerged from this recession, it would help justify the hardship so many people are currently experiencing. ~ Denis Hayes

Half a dozen brats turned with expressions of derision, and Lyra threw her cigarette down, recognizing the cue for a fight. Everyone's daemon instantly became warlike: each child was accompanied by fangs, or claws, or bristling fur, and Pantalaimon, contemptuous of the limited imaginations of these gyptian daemons, became a dragon the size of a deer hound. ~ Philip Pullman

While one was an undergraduate, one could feel virtuous and indignant at the vices of Oxford, at least at those which one did not indulge in, particularly at the flunkeyism and money-worship which are our most prevalent and disgraceful sins. But when one is a fellow it is quite another affair. They become a sore burthen then, enough to break one's heart. ~ Thomas Hughes

Children, as well as grown-ups, in their individual, glorified, drudgery-proof homes of Labrador, the tropics, the Orient, or where you will, to which they can pass with pleasure and
expedition by means of ever-improving transportation, will be able to tune in their television and radio to the moving picture lecture of, let us say, President Lowell of Harvard; the
professor of Mathematics of Oxford; of the doctor of Indian antiquities of Delhi, etc. ~ R. Buckminster Fuller

There should be a drama series about women trying to figure out their mystery leg bruises. ~ Kelly Oxford

HERE'S HOW MY OXFORD DICTIONARY DEFINES IT: "The spasmodic utterance, facial distortion, shaking of the sides, etc., which form the instinctive impression of mirth." To me this sounds like the array of symptoms caused by a lethal virus, but it's actually a description of one of the best things life has to offer: laughter. With certain exceptions, the Joy Diet requires you to do it at least thirty times a day. ~ Martha N. Beck

And at the word alone, Will felt a great wave of rage and despair moving outwards from a place deep within him, as if his mind were an ocean that some profound convulsion had disturbed. All his life he'd been alone, and now he must be alone again, and this infinitely precious blessing that had come to him must be taken away almost at once.He felt the wave build higher and steeper to darken the sky, he felt the crest tremble and begin to spill, he felt the great mass crashing down with the whole weight of the ocean behind it against the iron-bound coast of what had to be. And he felt himself crying aloud with more anger and pain than he had ever felt in his life, and he found Lyra just as helpless in his arms. But as the wave expended its force and the waters withdrew, the bleak rocks remained; there was no arguing with fate; neither his despair nor Lyra's had moved them a single inch. ~ Philip Pullman

...a minority is only thought of as a minority if it constitutes some kind of threat to the majority, real or imaginary. And no threat is ever quite imaginary...Just ask yourselves: what would this particular minority do if it suddenly became the majority, overnight?
'All right - now along come the liberals - including everybody in the room, I trust - and they say, 'minorities are just people, like us '. Sure, minorities are people, just like us'. Sure, minorities are people; people , not angels. Sure, they're like us - but not exactly like us; that's the all-too-familiar state of liberal hysteria, in which you begin to kid yourself you honestly cannot see a difference between a Negro and a Swede -'
(Why, oh why daren't George say 'between Estelle Oxford and Buddy Sorensen'? Maybe, if he did dare, there would be a great atomic blast of laughter, and everybody would embrace, and the kingdom of heaven would begin, right here in the classroom 278. But then, again, maybe it wouldn't.)
'So,let's face it, minorities are people who probably look and act and think differently from us, and have faults we don't have. We may dislike the way they look and act, and we may hate their faults. And it's better if we admit to disliking and hating them, than if we try to smear out feelings over with pseudo-liberal sentimentality. If we're frank about our feelings, we have a safety-valve; and if we have a safety-valve, we're actually less likely to start persecuting... ~ Christopher Isherwood

Thus it is a very serious lapse in scholarly competence and/or intellectual integrity for someone like Dawkins, an Oxford don who sees fit to pour scorn on the scholarly acumen and intellectual honesty of others, to treat the Five Ways as if they constituted Aquinas's complete case for God's existence, to ignore Aquinas's responses to various objections, and to tell his readers that Aquinas gives "absolutely no reason" for certain claims that, as I have said, he actually devotes many hundreds of pages to defending. ~ Edward Feser

Lyra marveled at the effect hope could have. ~ Philip Pullman

All of my education at Harvard, then Oxford, then Paris was in literature - even my thesis was on Shakespeare. ~ Jonathan Kozol

The talked about their messed-up, dysfunctional families, carefully respecting boundaries, never probing too deep in any one sitting. And they always ended up laughing. Even when the subject matter was intense or macabre, Henry's sick and twisted and often politically incorrect sense of humor was infectious ... Gloria laughed more in these first weeks at Oxford then she remembered laughing almost anywhere. ~ Andrea Kayne Kaufman