“A union of literary and scientific culturesthere was not the dissociation of sensibility that was so soon to come... Davy himself was writing (and sometimes publishing) a good deal of poetry at the...”

“...read 1984 when it came out in 1949, and found its account of the memory hole peculiarly evocative and frightening, for it accorded with my own doubts about my memory. I think that reading this l...”

“And I often dream of chemistry at night, dreams that conflate the past and the present, the grid of the periodic table transformed to the grid of Manhattan. [] Sometimes, too, I dream of the indeci...”

“[photography]... wanted to understand, to master for myself, all the processes involved, and to manipulate them in my own way.”

“My mother showed me that when tin or zinc was bent it uttered a special cry. Its due to deformation of the crystal structure, she said, forgetting that I was five, and could not understand her - an...”

“I liked numbers because they were solid, invariant; they stood unmoved in a chaotic world. There was in numbers and their relation something absolute, certain, not to be questioned, beyond doubt.”

“In a universe where all life is in movement, where ever fact seen in perspective is totally engaging, we impose stillness on lively young bodies, distort reality to dullness, make action drudgery. ...”

“If only she could be so oblivious again, to feel such love without knowing it, mistaking it for laughter. ”

“When you're a kid all you know is that your dad puts on his suit or overalls and vanishes from your life until nightfall. Sometimes my pops came back exhausted and scarlet-eyed, as if he'd been eng...”

“Sometimes, insatiable curiosity and compassion are all that life requires of us.”

“Curiosity is the one thing invincible in Nature.”

“If spectacle is lacking in everyday life, it may be because we have forgotten where and how to look.”

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettie...”

“To know the history of science is to recognize the mortality of any claim to universal truth. ”

“The scientist only imposes two things, namely truth and sincerity, imposes them upon himself and upon other scientists.”