Peculiar Quotations

I always like to have faith that an audience will suspend their disbelief, if you present it to them in the right way. I find it peculiar when people scoff at one bold idea, and yet they'll then turn over and watch a man travel through time in a police phone box. I think it's just how you present the idea.

The lawyer has not reached the height of his vocation who does not find therein... scope for a peculiar but genuine artistic function.

Haven't you felt a peculiar sort of worry about the chair in your living room that no one sits in?

There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.

Fidelity - a virtue peculiar to those who are about to be betrayed.

I've never minded solitude. For a writer, it's a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.

As the treaty made with the United States was the first treaty entered into by your country with other countries, therefore the President regards Japan with peculiar friendliness.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.

I think there's something peculiar about me that I haven't died. It doesn't make sense but I refuse to die.

Muscles are in a most intimate and peculiar sense the organs of the will.

Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.

The degree to which you're peculiar and different is the degree to which you must learn to hear people thinking. Just in self-defense you have to learn, where is their kindness? Where is their danger? Where is their generosity?

Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed.

Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

Having to think so much about fictitious relationships that work or don't work, and with each relationship between characters managing to do one or other of those in its own peculiar way, I spend a lot of time thinking about relationships, real and imagined.

I once dreamed a whole short story. Wrapped in its peculiar atmosphere, as if draped in clouds, I walked entranced to my desk at about 4 A.M. and typed it on to the screen.

My address book of dealers and private collectors, smugglers and fixers, agents, runners and the peculiar assortment of art hangers-on was longer than anyone else's in the field.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

There is absolutely no point in not being a populist. What I feel emboldened to do is to take something which is a minority interest and make it accessible without dumbing it down. I'm such an enthusiast for peculiar things, things that are perhaps a bit avant-garde, and try and involve everyone.

Our planet has a peculiar wobble - its precession. And that precession produces upheavals in our weather, weather alterations we cycle through every 22,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years.

The anti-apartheid prisoners on the island, like so many in every age and nation, found that Shakespeare had a peculiar ability to gentle their condition. They used to gather clandestinely to read the plays; on one occasion, the book was passed around for each man to mark his favourite lines.

I found it peculiar that those who wanted to take military action could - with 100 per cent certainty - know that the weapons existed and turn out to have zero knowledge of where they were.

I thought it was something peculiar to me. I thought I was abnormal.

C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group

I wouldn't be very happy if a poet read what I had written and said, 'What a peculiar thing to say about this work of mine.'

What sets 'Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children' apart is Riggs's use of 'found' photographs as a spark of inspiration for the narrative. 'Found' describes art created from common objects that are not normally considered art.

The press is like the peculiar uncle you keep in the attic - just one of those unfortunate things.

I've got a very peculiar sort of fame, based on being on the telly. It doesn't mean you have the lifestyle people expect.

There is a kind of desperate need for somebody to tell everyone what to do, which I find really peculiar in America. And then when you tell them, they're not interested, because it's also a country where everybody's opinion is their opinion, and they really don't give a damn what you think. So it's a very odd experience.

Today's particle physics describe light as a crumple in space, and we may have deformed space in such a way that they noticed something peculiar - and they had the ability to investigate it.

The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar 'commodity.' It can't be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn't delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value.

You don't have to be peculiar to find God,

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

That's one of the peculiar things about bad moods - we often fool ourselves and create misery by telling ourselves things that simply are not true.

There's something peculiar about writing fiction. It requires an interesting balance between seeing the world as a child and having the wisdom of a middle-aged person. The further you get from childhood and the experience of the teenage years, the greater the danger of losing that wellspring.

Generally, it's a great exercise to not get stuck in one medium too long because you begin to lose perspective on the peculiar drawbacks and strengths of the medium. For example, if I'm in the back of the stage and I want you to see my emotional change by a flicker of my eyelid, we're all going to be in for a long boring evening.

The chemotherapy was very peculiar, something that makes you feel much worse than the cancer itself, a very nasty thing. I used to go to treatment on my own, and nearly everybody else was with somebody. I wouldn't have liked that. Why would you want to make anybody sit in those places?

Truth is more peculiar than fiction. Life is really a startling place.

The number of flavors is infinite, for every soluble body has a peculiar flavor, like none other.

There is probably no oral society that fails to mark the spatial distinction of left and right, peculiar as this distinction may be.

Pop music can absorb so many peculiar talents, ranging from the completely nonmusical poseur who just uses music as a kind of springboard for a sense of style, to people who just love putting all that complicated stuff together, brick by brick, on their computers, to people like me who like playing conceptual games and being surprised.

I can remember somebody once saying to me that they thought my life must be less real than these other people that they were writing about, which I found a very peculiar thing 'cos all our lives are equally real, and it's just a matter of depicting them and talking about them.

For the metropolis presents the peculiar conditions which are revealed to us as the opportunities and the stimuli for the development of both these ways of allocating roles to men.

I try to get to those peculiar and particular things that you never think of to say.

The revealed Word awakened me, but it was the preached Word that saved me, and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights.

My work with AIDS patients started right at the beginning of the epidemic, totally unplanned and spontaneous, as all my work had proceeded in the previous two decades, if it were not already my whole life-style! In the early eighties, we knew very little about this peculiar disease.

One of the strangest experiences one can have is to sleep on stage, as I once did in Sydney when I'd lost the key to my flat. I had to stay at night in a bed, which conveniently was on stage because my character Sandy Stone did his monologue from a bed. To wake up looking at a shadowy auditorium is a very peculiar feeling.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

If someone wrote it and it had a peculiar twist, I've read it.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

Man's constitution is so peculiar that his health is purely a negative matter. No sooner is the rage of hunger appeased than it becomes difficult to comprehend the meaning of starvation. It is only when you suffer that you really understand.

The danger in our system is that the general government, which represents the interests of the whole, may encroach on the states, which represent the peculiar and local interests, or that the latter may encroach on the former.

Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone - both to the novice and to the experienced physicist.

Just as the blurring between childhood and adulthood has produced the kidult, so the stretching of middle into old age has fostered another peculiar chimera: septuagenarians with apoptosis sporting the depeche mode.

The American president has a peculiar leadership responsibility to speak out for freedom.

Americans hate their cable companies - for bumbling installers, on-again-off-again transmissions, peculiar channel selections, and indifferent customer service. The only thing cable subscribers hate more than the cable company is not being able to get what it delivers: multichannel selection and good reception.

My lyrics are generated by various peculiar processes. Very random and similar to automatic writing.

I am a novelist turned temporary adventurer, and I chose to write television, movies and plays for much the same reason that Henry Morgan selected the Spanish Main for his peculiar - and not dissimilar - sphere of operations.

One's life is peculiar to one's own when one has invented it.

When thus the heart is in a vein Of tender thought, the simplest strain Can touch it with peculiar power.

Among the minor, yet striking characteristics of mathematics, may be mentioned the fleshless and skeletal build of its propositions; the peculiar difficulty, complication, and stress of its reasonings; the perfect exactitude of its results; their broad universality; their practical infallibility.

Every age has its peculiar folly: Some scheme, project, or fantasy into which it plunges, spurred on by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the force of imitation.

We are all equal not because we partake in some peculiar nature or because we share in the same credo of unreasoned beliefs, but because we take it that no thinking being is incapable of seeing reason.

It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.

I was funny -- ha-ha, not peculiar. It was a modest currency, like pennies: pedestrian, somewhat laborious, but a currency nonetheless. I was funny, in public, most often at my own expense.

Personal style, be it that of Michelangelo, or that of Tintoretto... has always been that peculiar personal rapport which has developed between an artist and his medium.

A reader's tastes are peculiar. Choosing books to read is like making your way down a remote and winding path. Your stops on that path are always idiosyncratic. One book leads to another and another the way one thought leads to another and another. My type of reader is the sort who burrows through the stacks in the bookstore or the library (or the Web site — stacks are stacks), yielding to impulse and instinct.

None of that is necessary. It's not as if we're in a situation where it is us or them.There's something peculiar about talking about the moral status of animals, when we are killing and eating them for no reason whatsoever.

There are mixed emotions about this because usually I am riding for Sheikh Mohammed in this race, ... I have to thank him for letting me ride. It feels a little peculiar that I won this for the main opposition, but that's the way things have gone this year.

The process of being filmed was, I found, peculiar but not discomfiting. At 13, you are malleable, adaptable, better able to take the unusual in your stride.

Which I wish to remark-- And my language is plain,-- That for ways that are dark And for tricks that are vain, The heathen Chinee is peculiar.

We have a peculiar situation in which the shoppers seem to feel there is plenty to be cheerful about but the bond market is much more cautious.

Ramses had always been fond of Helen, in his peculiar fashion, but if he had looked at me as he was looking at her, I would have sent for a constable.

Every age has its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions and its own peculiar preconceptions.

Courage is a peculiar kind of fear.

Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne a sceptred hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality.

Liberal Christianity, of course, has enemies, but they are everyone's enemies - sexism, racism, homophobia. But liberal versions of Christianity, which can be both theologically and politically conservative, assume that what it means to be Christian qua Christian is to have no enemies peculiar to being Christian.

I am stricken with the peculiar curse of being a 21st-century woman who makes more than the man she's living with - first with a husband for 13 years and now with a new partner.

Baseball grew rapidly in favor; the field was ripe. America needed a live outdoor sport, and this game exactly suited the national temperament. It required all the manly qualities of activity, endurance, pluck, and skill peculiar to cricket, and was immeasurably superior to that game in exciting features.

HAG, n. An elderly lady whom you do not happen to like; sometimes called, also, a hen, or cat. Old witches, sorceresses, etc., were called hags from the belief that their heads were surrounded by a kind of baleful lumination or nimbus --hag being the popular name of that peculiar electrical light sometimes observed in the hair. At one time hag was not a word of reproach: Drayton speaks of a ""beautiful hag, all smiles,"" much as Shakespeare said, ""sweet wench."" It would not now be proper to call your sweetheart a hag --that compliment is reserved for the use of her grandchildren.

He . . . felt towards those whom he had deserted that peculiar malignity which has, in all ages, been characteristic of apostates.

What would politics be without its own particular peculiar sense of humour, even if it is not quite funny, ha ha.

Happy Ending I did with Paul Winfield. There was a play-within-the-play and I was his mother - which is a peculiar bit of casting, to say the least.

I ain't saying I should be starting, but I think I deserve some minutes. That's all I'm saying. It's not a situation where I'm saying I demand to be traded. I'm in a peculiar situation myself. I'm in a contract season. They made a trade for me, and I want to play, I want to compete, that's all.

I actually have a peculiar feminism that does not involve the idea that women shouldn't be sexy. Female characters written in comics have always been pretty damned sexy, and used their sexuality. And I don't have any problem with that.

Harry does a great job coaching the team. They have a peculiar style - they play a very small lineup and everyone shoots the ball. It's a real challenge to defend them.

It has always struck me as being peculiar that we do so little with our military history, in particular with that war, although it would have been ferociously difficult to shoot before now - beyond our means and capacity to photograph.

I write in a very peculiar way. I think about a book for 25 or 30 years in a kind of inchoate way, and at one point or another, I realize the book is ready to be written. I usually have a character, a first line, and general idea of what the book is going to be about.

My career has evolved at its own peculiar pace. American careers are supposed to have a much more singular direction than I've been able to... stomach.

Where do babies come from? Don't bother asking adults. They lie like pigs. However, diligent independent research and hours of playground consultation have yielded fruitful, if tentative, results. There are several theories. Near as we can figure out, it has something to do with acting ridiculous in the dark. We believe it is similar to dogs when they act peculiar and ride each other. This is called "making love". Careful study of popular song lyrics, advertising catch-lines, TV sitcoms, movies, and T-Shirt inscriptions offers us significant clues as to its nature. Apparently it makes grown-ups insipid and insane. Some graffiti was once observed that said "sex is good". All available evidence, however, points to the contrary.

I think that to transfuse emotion - not to transmit thought but to set up in the reader's sense a vibration corresponding to what was felt by the writer - is the peculiar function of poetry.

In abstract mathematics, of course operations alter those particular relations which are involved in the considerations of number and space, and the results of operations are those peculiar results which correspond to the nature of the subjects of operation.

In studying the action of the Analytical Engine, we find that the peculiar and independent nature of the considerations which in all mathematical analysis belong to operations, as distinguished from the objects operated upon and from the results of the operations performed upon those objects, is very strikingly defined and separated.

The Analytical Engine is an embodying of the science of operations, constructed with peculiar reference to abstract number as the subject of those operations.

But the science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value; just as logic has its own peculiar truth and value, independently of the subjects to which we may apply its reasonings and processes.

A peculiar virtue in wildlife ethics is that the hunter ordinarily has no gallery to applaud or disapprove of his conduct

[T]he Constitution ought to be the standard of construction for the laws, and that wherever there is an evident opposition, the laws ought to give place to the Constitution. But this doctrine is not deducible from any circumstance peculiar to the plan of convention, but from the general theory of a limited Constitution.