David Storey Quotes

He felt his mother’s presence acutely, a kind of animality, dull, uncomprehending, locked in its own kind of inconclusiveness: the slow alarm that had gradually overwhelmed her as she watched her family growing up, startled, seeing them slowly replace her in significance and purpose, and saying, ‘So this is how it happens.

Though what I have in mind’, he said, ‘is something far different. I thought if we listened to the music you could write down whatever you felt.’ He turned on the gramophone.

Factory fodder. I don’t see what hope they have in their lives. I mean,’ he added, ‘what prospect do they have before them? A dance hall and a bottle of beer.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke. Something about the gesture reminded Colin of Dr Dorman. It was on this same bus, and at the same time on a Saturday evening, that he would ride back to the village after seeing Margaret. He gazed out of the window for a while. ‘I mean, it’s an animal existence when you come down to it. What do you think?

obsessive

Perhaps it’s all an animal existence,’ he said. He had to raise his voice above the rattle of the bus. Below them passed the dark waters of the river.

Heights

Bletchley said, sweating freshly in the heat of the bus. ‘Some of the species adapt, others don’t. In effect, when coal is acquired by wholly mechanical means or perhaps isn’t even needed at all, people like Batty and his brothers, and Stringer, won’t have a function. And when the function ceases so does the species, or those parts of it that can’t recognize or create a further function.

was talking to that girl we were dancing with.’ Bletchley ran his handkerchief round beneath his collar. ‘Apparently he hardly makes anything out of it at all.

When I asked a Portuguese mathematician of my acquaintance whether he had any insight to offer me on the subject, he replied, “The foundations of mathematics are full of holes and I never felt comfortable dealing with such things.” Full of holes. Earlier generations of mathematicians assumed that the stability of the landscape on which mathematical structures were built was guaranteed by God or nature. They strode in like pioneers or surveyors, their task to map the fundamentals and in so doing secure the territory that future generations would colonize. But then the holes—of which the liar’s paradox is merely one—started popping up, and the mathematicians started falling in. Never mind! Each hole could be plugged. But soon enough another would open, and another, and another . . . Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) spoke for any number of idealistic mathematicians when he wrote in 1907, The discovery that all mathematics follows inevitably from a small collection of fundamental laws, is one which immeasurably enhances the intellectual beauty of the whole: to those who have been oppressed by the fragmentary and incomplete nature of most existing chains of deduction, this discovery comes with all the overwhelming force of a revelation: like a palace emerging from the autumn mist as the traveller ascends an Italian hill-side, the stately storeys of the mathematical edifice appear in their due order and proportion, with a new perfection in every part. I remember that when I read George Eliot’s Middlemarch in college, I was particularly fascinated by the character of Mr. Casaubon, whose lifework was a Key to All Mythologies that he could never finish. If Mr. Casaubon’s Key was doomed to incompletion, my astute professor observed, it was at least in part because “totalizing projects,” by their very nature, ramify endlessly; they cannot hope to harness the multitude of tiny details demanded by words like “all,” just as they cannot hope to articulate every generalization to which their premises (in this case, the idea that all mythologies have a single key) give rise. Perhaps without realizing it, my professor was making a mathematical statement—she was asserting the existence of both the infinite and the infinitesimal—and her objections to Mr. Casaubon’s Key hold as well for any number of attempts on the part of mathematicians to establish a Key to All Mathematics.

One night of admiration was no consolation for a lifetime of being trapped in this room. “We are about to go see the unveiling of that young man’s new David. It’s exciting. The whole city is out in the streets.

The reductionist conception leads naturally to a classification of subjects and theories in a hierarchy, according to how close they are to the ‘lowest-level’ predictive theories that are known. In this hierarchy, logic and mathematics form the immovable bedrock on which the edifice of science is built. The foundation stone would be a reductive ‘theory of everything’, a universal theory of particles, forces, space and time, together with some theory of what the initial state of the universe was. The rest of physics forms the first few storeys. Astrophysics and chemistry are at a higher level, geology even higher, and so on. The edifice branches into many towers of increasingly high-level subjects like biochemistry, biology and genetics. Perched at the tottering, stratospheric tops are subjects like the theory of evolution, economics, psychology and computer science, which in this picture are almost inconceivably derivative.

Plague lived on Högklintavägen in Sundbyberg, a markedly unglamorous area with dull, four-storey, faded brick houses, and the apartment itself had nothing much going for it. It had a sour, stale smell, and his desk was covered in all sorts of rubbish, McDonald’s containers and Coca-Cola cans, crumpled-up pages from notebooks, unwashed coffee cups and empty sweet packets. Even though some had actually made it into the wastepaper basket – which had not been emptied for weeks – you could hardly take a step in the room without getting crumbs or grit under your feet.

Plague lived on Högklintavägen in Sundbyberg, a markedly unglamorous area with dull, four-storey, faded brick houses, and the apartment itself had nothing much going for it. It had a sour, stale smell, and his desk was covered in all sorts of rubbish, McDonald’s containers and Coca-Cola cans, crumpled-up pages from notebooks, unwashed coffee cups and empty sweet packets. Even though some had actually made it into the wastepaper basket – which had not been emptied for weeks – you could hardly take a step in the room without getting crumbs or grit under your feet. But none of this would have surprised anyone who knew him. Plague was not a man who normally showered or changed his clothes much. He spent his whole life in front of the computer, even when he was not working: a giant of a man and overweight, bloated and unkempt, with an attempt at an imperial beard that had long since turned into a shapeless thicket. His posture was dreadful and he had a habit of groaning when he moved. But the man had other talents. He was a wizard on the computer, a hacker who flew unconstrained through cyberspace

[David Manning White] maintains that critics romanticize the past in order to castigate the present.

won literary prizes of some note, twice being shortlisted for the Booker Prize, for instance, and once winning it outright (Saville). Their styles of presentation might be described as ‘elemental’: in the case of Radcliffe,

His life had been fragmented into a third and final part. First there’d been his life in the village, then his life at the school; now there was a more formidable portion of his existence which he’d never, consciously, been aware of before, a self-absorption which took him away from the other two.