“ Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called , or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in th… Christopher Hitchens
“ Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn't) 'if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize, Blum… Christopher Hitchens
“ I'd hoped for someone who was remarkably intelligent, but disadvantaged by home circumstance, someone who only needed an hour's extra tuition a week to become some kind of working-class prodigy. I wan… Nick Hornby
“ 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 begu… Richard Rhodes
“ Nine-tenths of all artistic creation derives its basic energy from the engine of repression and sublimation, and well beyond the strict Freudian definition of those terms.John Fowles attended new Coll… John Fowles
“ Have you at any time been detained in a mental home or similar institution? If so, give particulars.''I was at Scone College, Oxford, for two years,' said Paul. Evelyn Waugh
“ I envy you going to Oxford: it is the most flower-like time of one's life. One sees shadow of things in silver mirrors. Later on, one sees the Gorgon's head, and one suffers, because it does not retur… Julia Whelan
“ Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance. Jeanette Winterson
“ None but the most blindly credulous will imaging the characters and events in this story to be anything but fictitious. It is true that the ancient and noble city of Oxford is, of all the towns of Eng… Edmund Crispin
“ Rome has been called the "Sacred City": - might not our Oxford be called so too? There is an air about it, resonant of joy and hope: it speaks with a thousand tongues to the heart: it waves its mighty… William Hazlitt
“ The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked p… Charles Finch
“ Everybody, professors and students and Proctors the same, knew that if the sign said 'do not walk on the grass', one hopped. Anybody who didn't had failed to understand what Oxford was. Natasha Pulley
“ The truth was that I didn't know my own mind. Just as you might move into a house and in the scatterbrained days of unpacking leave a broom in some corner, where it remains until someone uses it and t… Charles Finch
“ Though his public teaching lasted only three years, it has been scrutinized by scholars in every science—among them theology, philosophy, psychology, and sociology to name a few. Jesus’ influence has… Jon Morrison
“ Gloria watched the swollen white orb of a hot-air balloon rising over Navy Pier and knew she had to break it off with Oliver, for he was the type who would never enjoy hot-air balloons, Van Morrison s… Andrea Kayne Kaufman
“ See that the mind is honest, first; the rest may follow or not as God wills. [That] the fundamental treason to the mind ... is the one fundamental treason which the scholar's mind must not allow is th… Dorothy L. Sayers
