University Of Oxford Alumni

"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."

"Women who are (beyond all doubt) the mothers of all mischief, also nurse that babe to sleep, when he is too noisy."

"“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.”"

"Proust, who did not greatly admire Flaubert, except perhaps in his narrow sense as a stylist – or perhaps only did not care very much for his work – nevertheless owed him a great deal, without realizing how much. From Flaubert he obtained the art of expressing his characters indirectly, through a monologue interieur. This method of characterization is one of Flaubert's greatest contributions to the art of fiction and, as we have seen in Madame Bovary, it is very different from the direct method of characterization practised by Balzac and Stendhal."

"I for my part was nothing loth, and preferred to see London by daylight. And after all, it was not worth seeing, but a very hideous and dirty place, not at all like Exmoor."

"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."

"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."

"All the beauty of the spring went for happy men to think of; all the increase of the year was for other eyes to mark. Not a sign of any sunrise for me from my fount of life, not a breath to stir the dead leaves fallen on my heart's Spring."

"I cannot go through all my thoughts so as to make them clear to you, nor have I ever dwelt on things, to shape a story of them. I know not where the beginning was, nor where the middle ought to be, nor even how at the present time I feel, or think, or ought to think. If I look for help to those around me, who should tell me right and wrong (being older and much wiser), I meet sometimes with laughter, and at other times with anger."

"It might have been a good thing for me to have had a father to beat these rovings out of me; or a mother to make a home, and teach me how to manage it. For, being left with none—I think; and nothing ever comes of it. Nothing, I mean, which I can grasp and have with any surety; nothing but faint images, and wonderment, and wandering."

"Often too I wonder at the odds of fortune, which made me (helpless as I am, and fond of peace and reading) the heiress of this mad domain, the sanctuary of unholiness."

"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."

"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."

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

"Too late we know the good from bad; the knowledge is no pleasure then; being memory's medicine rather than the wine of hope."

"“I think, Master Ridd, you cannot know,” she said, with her eyes taken from me, “what the dangers of this place are, and the nature of the people.” “Yes, I know enough of that; and I am frightened greatly, all the time, when I do not look at you.”"

"But a sigh is not (like a yawn) infectious; and we are all more prone to be sent to sleep than to sorrow by one another. Not but what a sigh sometimes may make us think of sighing."

"Unhurt people are not much good in the world."

"It is the manner of all good boys to be careless of apparel, and take no pride in adornment."

"“Hould thee tongue, lad,' he said sharply; 'us be naigh the Doone-track now, two maile from Dunkery Beacon hill, the haighest place of Hexmoor. So happen they be abroad to-naight, us must crawl on our belly-places, boy.”"

"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."

"But now, at Dulverton, we dined upon the rarest and choicest victuals that ever I did taste. Even now, at my time of life, to think of it gives me appetite, as once and awhile to think of my first love makes me love all goodness. Hot mutton pasty was a thing I had often heard of from very wealthy boys and men, who made a dessert of dinner; and to hear them talk of it made my lips smack, and my ribs come inwards."

"is much more common than classical . It is estimated to affect about one in every three or four hundred of the general population. More than half a million people in the United Kingdom have some kind of disorder on the autistic spectrum, with over 200,000 of them having Asperger's syndrome. Disorders of the autistic spectrum are found much more often in men than in women, although this may be because women are better at compensating for some of their more noticeable features, being better at social relationships and less likely to exhibit narrow interest patterns."

"In the hour of death, after this life’s whim, When the heart beats low, and the eyes grow dim, And pain has exhausted every limb— The lover of the Lord shall trust in Him. For even the purest delight may pall, And power must fail, and the pride must fall, And the love of the dearest friends grow small— But the glory of the Lord is all in all."

"But whatever lives or dies, business must be attended to; and the principal business of good Christians is, beyond all controversy, to fight with one another."

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

"On the right-hand side was a mighty oven, where Betty threatened to bake us; and on the left, long sides of bacon, made of favoured pigs, and growing very brown and comely. Annie knew the names of all, and ran up through the wood-smoke, every now and then, when a gentle memory moved her, and asked them how they were getting on, and when they would like to be eaten. Then she came back with foolish tears, at thinking of that necessity; and I, being soft in a different way, would make up my mind against bacon. But, Lord bless you! it was no good. Whenever it came to breakfast-time, after three hours upon the moors, I regularly forgot the pigs, but paid good heed to the rashers."

"Although the main field of Laplace's research was , he also made important contributions to the and . In his (Analytical theory of probability) of 1812 he summarized, in a masterly introduction, all that was then known in the area of probability and its applications. This work introduces the technique known later as the Laplace transform, a simple and elegant method of solving s."

"Despite poor eyesight, Kepler was one of the pioneers of research into optics. He found a good approximation to the . Descartes, the discoverer of the precise law, said that Kepler was his true teacher in optics, who knew more about this subject than did any of those who preceded him. This research was published in his of 1611, which also contained an account of a new . Towards the end of his life he wrote a small work on the gauging of wine casks, which is regarded as one of the significant works in the ."

"Although the theory of s (s where the underlying space is a and the group operations are ) goes back to around 1870 the theory of topological groups in a more general sense seem not to have been considered until 1925 when and , independently, made the basic definitions, rather in the spirit of , and since then this too has developed into a major branch of . It was Weil (1937) who wrote the first definitive study of s and applied the theory to both s and topological groups. However the basic idea was already emerging early in the century, indeed the concepts of and were well understood by Weierstrass and by Cauchy before him."

"Without you, Heaven would be too dull to bear, And Hell would not be Hell if you are there."

"If I cared for influence—which means, for the most part, making people do one's will, without knowing it—my first step toward it would be to be called, in common parlance, “slow but sure.”"

"But during those two months of fog (for we had it all the winter), the saddest and the heaviest thing was to stand beside the sea. To be upon the beach yourself, and see the long waves coming in; to know that they are long waves, but only see a piece of them; and to hear them lifting roundly, swelling over smooth green rocks, plashing down in the hollow corners, but bearing on all the same as ever, soft and sleek and sorrowful, till their little noise is over."

"“Now let us bandy words no more,” said mother, very sweetly; “nothing is easier than sharp words, except to wish them unspoken.”"

"He cannot be seen as an Enlightenment figure. What we think of as eighteenth-century, in terms of architecture, furniture, painting and the decorative arts, came mostly after his heyday. He died in 1745 and was isolated by deafness and dementia from the late 1730s."

"With his wife, he founded the . He had no idea when he married Virginia Stephen how her mental instability would determine and distort his own trajectory, nor that she would become one of the most famous English authors of the twentieth century. He knew how to love, and she was the love of his life. After came change and a . In his last decade, five volumes of autobiography won him respect and recognition. He left not only distinguished books on international relations, but also satirical squibs, a great mass of literary and political journalism, a play, poetry, short stories, and two novels."

"The letters to are Bowen's "writing" in the same way as her books and stories are. Readers of her fiction will find echoes and resonances. She told him with great freedom about how she writes, when she writes, what it feels like to be writing. When, late in life, she started on The Little Girls, she shared the process of creation with him as never before — even though The Heat of the Day, about love and betrayal in London during the war, is dedicated "To Charles Ritchie". If these were only love-letters, they would not be so valuable or extraordinary. Bowen is a natural and practised story-teller with a genius for evoking atmosphere. She can be wonderfully funny as well as deadly serious as she regales Ritchie with the minutiae of her life, whether in Ireland, England, Europe or America. She spills out, without inhibition, her opinions and prejudices."

"and , the principal family historians, both wrote that it was Mr Trollope's idea that should go to America. They may have been fudging the real issues here, just as they fudged the long association of Mrs Trollope with ."

"It was the patrician in Vita that first fascinated Mrs Woolf. The aristocratic manner, she noted, was like an actress's ..."

"In 1920, , Edith, and Helen Rootham instituted the Anglo-French Poetry Society, largely as a platform for Mrs. Bennett's recitations."

"Considerable difficulties, however, beset the way of 's biographer. Her life was so much bound up with her husband's career that to write an orthodox biography would merely be to repeat the story which has already been told with such fullness and brilliance by and ."

"A picnic is the Englishman's grand gesture ..."

"It was at , and then at , that Georgina's literary career took wing. In 1943 her Charlotte Mary Yonge: the Story of an Uneventful Life was published. 's reputation as a writer was then at its nadir, and Georgina's book provoked a savage and contemptuous review by Mrs , but it was greeted with joy by a wide, though secret band of fans throughout the country, and led to a revival in Charlotte Yonge studies in university English literature departments, and to the foundation, a few years later, of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society, an elite group of writers such as , and ."

"Lyra Innocentium was much valued by the devout, but it never attained to the world-wide popularity of ', and in some quarters it gave positive offence. ... Keble's chief reason for publishing Lyra Innocentium was his desire to raise money for the rebuilding of Hursley Church."

"... today even our s are presented at a Garden Court, followed by a more or less picnic on the lawn. All classes and ranks share in this taste ..."

"Oxford alumna Alice Winn, who studied English Literature at , may have published just one novel so far, but it is one hell of a debut. Since its appearance in 2023, In Memoriam has met with widespread acclaim and been lauded with prizes – and with good cause. It’s a genuinely compulsive page-turner, a sweeping historical tragedy and an intimate love story all rolled into one, exactly the kind of book that plays on your mind for a long time afterwards. Following a forbidden love between two soldiers in the First World War, you can imagine the acute sense of heartache that runs throughout."

"In the UK world war one is a selling point; in the US it's more an obstacle. In the UK we live in the fossilised wreckage of world war one; a lot of people see it as a turning point for the empire and it looms larger in the consciousness."

"Usually, when you read war literature, they’re trying to present what they went through to someone who wasn’t there."

"I find it interesting that most of the was written by officers. The same is not true in France and Germany. I can’t imagine that British privates wrote less — I wonder if they were simply published less? The best piece of writing I read from the perspective of a British private was ’ ', but it is abstract and more beautiful than useful, from a research perspective."

"The reader must not expect in this work merely the private uninteresting history of a single town. He may expect whatever curious particulars can with any propriety be connected with it. [...] Nor must the general disquisitions and the general narratives of the prefent work be ever confidered as actually digressionary in their natures, and as merely useful in their notices. They are all united with the rest, and form proper parts of the whole. They have fome of them a necessary connexion with the history of Manchester. They have many of them an intimate relation, they have all of them a natural affinity, to it. And the author has endeavoured, by a judicious distribution of them through the work, to prevent that difgusting uniformity, and to take off that uninteresting locality, which must necessarily result from the merely barren and private annals of a town. He has thus in some measure adopted the elegant principles of modern gardening. He has thrown down the close hedges and the high walls that have hitherto confined the antiquarians of our towns in their views. He has called in the scenes of the neighbouring country to his aid, and has happily combined them into his own plan. He has drawn off the attention to the history of Manchester before it became languid and exhausted, by fetching in some objects from the county at large, or by presenting some view of the national history. But he has been cautious of multiplying objects in the wantonness of refinement, and of distracting the attention with a confused variety. He has always considered the history of Manchester as the great fixed point, as the enlivening center, of all his excursions. Every opening is therefore made to carry an actual reference, either mediate or immediate, to the reregular history of Manerester. And every visto is employed only for the useful purpose of breaking the stiff straight lines, of lighting up the dark, of heightening the little, and colouring over the lifeless, in the regular history of Manchester."