University Of Oxford Alumni

"I’ve always loved my work"

"“It sounds extraordinary, but it’s a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.”"

"By bringing physical and mental healthcare together for the first time and embedding research at the heart of the hospital, we will treat the whole child, not just their illness"

"As someone whose life was saved by my own hospital, I would say if you’re really ill I would go to the NHS – I would not go to a private hospital"

"I found there was a field called photoelectrochemistry, invented by the American military in its attempts to build a solar rechargeable battery"

"The first thing I’d do would be to try to curtail population growth, because that puts a strain on so many resources as well as energy – food, land, housing. And that appears to be a question of economic development"

"try to avoid the boom and bust that afflicts the development of renewables. I’m not a hair-shirted environmentalist, I’m not anti-nuclear, I’m not even anti-fossil fuels – but I do believe in the reality of global warming"

"Onshore wind power to me is clean and green, although some people dislike it. It’s the cheapest form of energy, so these things will take their place"

"[M]ost of us are not good at appreciating the poetry of those appreciably younger than we are."

"[I]t is characteristic of true simplicity that there may radiate from its utmost directness a good many glinting things."

"Inerrancy about one's own powers is not a mark of the Victorian poets, nor even is a simple prudence about not over-reaching or over-archaizing. The Victorian poetaster over 'weens'."

"Great Britain was Victorian for two-thirds of a century. Things changed and counterchanged; even the Queen often proved a surprise, though it may be thought that she was a surprise like a Browning character, by being even more herself than one would ever have anticipated."

"[T]o travesty or to calumniate the Victorians is still such a cheap holiday."

"[The test of value in a work of art is] whether or not it continues to repay attention."

"Any anthologist of the unparagoned achievement that is English poetry must enjoy the pleasure, privilege, and responsibility of being for a while the master of its ceremonies. Or of being, at any rate, in the rueful Americanism, kinda humble and kinda proud."

"English poetry – having a life of its own – is forever being supplemented, complemented, culled, and found afresh. The anthologist had better not repine at the thought of his or her future departure."

"To me everything has to work round family, and fortunately it has"

"The debt crisis, losing the house, losing the security that you need when you are the mother of two small children, making a completely new life, that was the toughest thing I have ever done."

"The second judge treated me as if I was a liar, but I don’t move easily. I stand my ground."

"Lots of things go on in lots of marriages that are less than ideal and mostly they stay private and that’s how it really should be."

"Its thesis, that success for a woman is perhaps more broadly based than for a man, is absolutely true."

"I looked around and I thought, ‘there aren’t many women here’, and then I thought, and this is a very female thing to think, ‘I’m never going to keep up with this lot’, and it was one of my larger surprises when I discovered I was well up with that lot!"

"A partnership is about helping your partner in time of difficulty. That is when it matters. I am just not a quitter."

"There is something fairly deeply ingrained in our culture, and there probably is a real difference in early reading ability – girls are way ahead."

"We travel faster, and yet it takes us longer to get to work. ...when we traveled with the speed of about 8 miles per hour it took us an average of about 5-10 minutes to get to work; when we traveled with the speed of about 25 miles per hour, it took us about 20 minutes; when we travel nowadays with the speed of about 55 miles per hour it takes an average of about 45 minutes to reach work. Is this progress, or an illusion of progress? ... No doubt we buy and “consume” more books, records, reproductions, but most of them have become mere commodities. We are bombarded with new information, but we acquire no new knowledge, let alone new experience. Is this progress, or an illusion of progress?"

"I'm not in the business of writing my story."

"When a language creates – as it does – a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past."

"I’m tempted to quote Lady Longford on her husband, the Labour peer and prison reformer:when asked, 'Have you ever thought of divorce?’, she replied, 'Divorce never; murder, frequently’."

"It has been such a long time in the gestation… I want to live to see it open"

"Taste, discretion, and decision have, one likes to think, been exercised so as to manifest the variety of an age's poems, the felicitous heterogeneity, the diverting diversity, and the buoyant resistance which a world of poems will always put up even to the best literary historian's summary justice."

"Intimations of old age are much easier to face together. That’s not to say the marriage gets easier, but it would be very much harder growing old without each other."

"Fidelity is a great quality but kindness, loyalty and resilience are also very important in bad times."

"He took the rotundity of the moon, and the curves of creepers, and the clinging of tendrils, and the trembling of grass, and the slenderness of the reed, and the bloom of flowers, and the lightness of leaves, and the tapering of the elephant's trunk, and the glances of deer, and the clustering of rows of bees, and the joyous gaiety of sunbeams, and the weeping of clouds, and the fickleness of the winds, and the timidity of the hare, and the vanity of the peacock, and the softness of the parrot’s bosom, and the hardness of adamant, and the sweetness of honey, and the cruelty of the tiger, and the warm glow of fire, and the coldness of snow, and the chattering of jays, and the cooing of the kókila, and the hypocrisy of the crane, and the fidelity of the chakrawáka; and compounding all these together he made woman, and gave her to man."

"Though there is discord between revolutionary agrarianism and collectivism, they are alike in opposition to the uniform teaching and tradition of the Catholic Church on the lawfulness of private ownership of income-yielding property, whether it be named "land" or "capital". And they are alike in opposition to the ideal of all great statesmen from Solon to Leo XIII, namely, flourishing populations of small farmers or peasants."

"In the Divorce Court women complain of losing weight. Outside the Divorce Court they complain of putting it on."

"There is nothing in this world to fear, nothing to revere or trust, nothing even to hope for; least of all, is there aught to love."

"I delay so long, because I fear; because my whole life hangs in balance on a single word; because what I have near me now may never more be near me after, though more than all the world, or than a thousand worlds, to me."

"May be we are not such fools as we look. But though we be, we are well content, so long as we may be two fools together."

"I for my part was most thankful that I had not killed. For to have the life of a fellow-man laid upon one's conscience—deserved he his death, or deserved it not—is to my sense of right and wrong the heaviest of all burdens; and the one that wears most deeply inwards, with the dwelling of the mind on this view and on that of it."

"Whenever I wandered in the streets, what with the noise the people made, the number of the coaches, the running of the footmen, the swaggering of great courtiers, and the thrusting aside of everybody, many and many a time I longed to be back among the sheep again, for fear of losing temper."

"Either love me not at all, or as I love you for ever."

"The love of all things was upon me, and a softness to them all, and a sense of having something even such as they had."

"For nine women out of ten must have some kind of romance or other, to make their lives endurable; and when their love has lost this attractive element, this soft dew-fog (if such it be), the love itself is apt to languish; unless its bloom be well replaced by the budding hopes of children. Now Master Stickles neither had, nor wished to have, any children."

"Hope of course is nothing more than desire with a telescope, magnifying distant matters, overlooking near ones; opening one eye on the objects, closing the other to all objections. And if hope be the future tense of desire, the future of fear is religion—at least with too many of us."

"Having no knowledge of these great men, nor of the matter how far it was true, I had not very much to say about either of them or it; but this silence was not shared (although the ignorance may have been) by the hundreds of people around me."

"“Now what will ye please to eat?” she asked, with a lively glance at the size of my mouth: “that is always the first thing you people ask, in these barbarous places.” “I will tell you by-and-by,” I answered, misliking this satire upon us; “but I might begin with a quart of ale, to enable me to speak, madam.” “Very well. One quevart of be-or;” she called out to a little maid, who was her eldest child, no doubt. “It is to be expected, sir. Be-or, be-or, be-or, all day long, with you Englishmen!” “Nay,” I replied, “not all day long, if madam will excuse me. Only a pint at breakfast-time, and a pint and a half at eleven o'clock, and a quart or so at dinner. And then no more till the afternoon; and half a gallon at supper-time. No one can object to that.”"

"Soon we found Peggy and Smiler in company, well embarked on the homeward road, and victualling where the grass was good. Right glad they were to see us again—not for the pleasure of carrying, but because a horse (like a woman) lacks, and is better without, self-reliance."

"It seemed to me that if the lawyers failed to do their duty, they ought to pay people for waiting upon them, instead of making them pay for it."

"Least said soonest mended, because less chance of breaking."

"There was that power all round, that power and that goodness, which make us come, as it were, outside our bodily selves, to share them. Over and beside us breathes the joy of hope and promise; under foot are troubles past; in the distance bowering newness tempts us ever forward. We quicken with largesse of life, and spring with vivid mystery."