16,134 quotes found
“I was always interested in math. I counted everything as a child — the number of steps up the stairs, the dishes, the steps to church. Those thoughts just came naturally. While I skipped grades in ...”
“It’s just there. You can’t do anything without it. It’s in everything. I like to work problems. If you do your best, nobody can ask you to do it over again. I never had to repeat what I did.”
“I believed I was where I was supposed to be. When I was a student, my mentor told me I’d make a good research mathematician. I said, What is that? and he told me I’d have to find out for myself. At...”
“We put in some long hours at times, and I had three children at home. But they were very responsible, and I had family and friends who helped look after them.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time tutoring kids in math as a volunteer. I’ve always enjoyed helping people understand what they can find in math. There’s no judgment there.”
“Did I say that? One says so many things, and the problem is they all get written down.”
“―John Ashbery, The Art of Poetry No. 33. Interviewed by Peter A. Stitt.”
“It didn’t pay very much, but it enabled me to get other jobs doing art criticism, which I didn’t want to do very much, but as so often when you exhibit reluctance to do something, people think you ...”
“When I originally started writing, I expected that probably very few people would read my poetry because in those days people didn’t read poetry much anyway.”
“Well, there are certain stock words that I have found myself using a great deal. When I become aware of them, it is an alarm signal meaning I am falling back on something that has served in the pas...”
“Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,At incredible speed, traveling day and night,Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents, through narrow passes.But will he know where to ...”
“In the beginning there are those who don't quite fit inBut are somehow okay. And then some morningThere are places that suddenly seem wonderful:Weather and water seem wonderful,And the peaceful nig...”
“These two guys in the front yard—Are they here to help?”
“John Ashbery, incontrovertibly a great poet, remains both difficult and underread, even by his readers.”
“He had meticulous taste, if taste is a form of discernment, and discernment a kind of care and humility toward the world, its material stuff as well as its arbitrary weathers. He was drawn to the l...”
“The night-sea journey may be absurd, but here we swim, will-we nill-we, against the flood, onward and upward, toward a Shore that may not exist and couldn't be reached if it did.”
“Marilyn Marsh, who had about had it with Spain, declared to him [the old Spanish man]: … But it redounds to your national credit, the then Missus Turner went on in effect — she'd been reading up on...”
“One of the things I miss about teaching is that students would tell me what I ought to read. One of my students, back in the 1960s, put me onto Borges, and I remember another mentioning Flann O'Bri...”
“Women thought me charmingly shy, and sometimes stopped at nothing to penetrate the disdainful shell of my fear, as one of their number put it. Often as not, it was they who got penetrated.”
“[N]othing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it, from outside, by people.”
