Ashmolean Quotes & Sayings

It is chiefly at the moment when there is the greatest need for attaching them to the painful realities of life, that the threads of thought snap within the brain. — Victor Hugo

Meg took a batch of forks from the drawer and turned them over and over, looking at them. "I'm all confused again." "Oh, so 'm I," Calvin said gaily. "But now at least I know we're going somewhere. — Madeleine L'Engle

Elias Ashmole, a seventeenth-century book collector and alchemist whose books and papers had come to the Bodleian from the Ashmolean Museum in the nineteenth century, along with the number 782. — Deborah Harkness

We need to talk," she sputtered. Adam winced. He was sure there weren't any other words in the world that would strike fear into a man of any species as quickly as those four. A man never said them. — Ravyn Wilde

If one single invention was necessary to make this larger mechanism operative for constructive tasks as well as for coercion, it was probably the invention of writing. This method of translating speech into graphic record not merely made it possible to transmit impulses and messages throughout the system, but to fix accountability when written orders were not carried out. Accountability and the written word both went along historically with the control of large numbers; and it is no accident that the earliest uses of writing were not to convey ideas, religious or otherwise, but to keep temple records of grain, cattle, pottery, fabricated goods, stored and disbursed. This happened early, for a pre-dynastic Narmer mace in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford records the taking of 120,000 prisoners, 400,000 oxen, and 1,422,000 goats. The arithmetical reckoning was an even greater feat than the capture. — Lewis Mumford

What distinguishes genocide from murder, and even from acts of political murder that claim as many victims, is the intent. The crime is wanting to make a people extinct. The idea is the crime. — Philip Gourevitch

Laeth returned her smile with one as wicked, as he posed the favorite question of one of the combat instructors, "How many ways are there to kill a person with a knife?"
"It doesn't matter, it only takes one to do the job," returned Rialla. — Patricia Briggs

I found that I could not contemplate an adult life in which books were not dominant. I wanted to live and work with them ... I had to be able to take books from their places, run my finger over their backs, see how they opened, flick their corners straight. I wanted a perspective of bookshelves always in my eye. And books, books, books. This was not a rational way of determining on a career and was much tainted by mushiness. But it was the way in which my decision hardened, before I was fifteen years old, to become a librarian. — Clifford Currie Librarian Of The Ashmolean Library Oxford

Our world was Northern, black and white, so it was a great thing for my sisters and me to sit down at Christmastime and watch these fabulous MGM musicals. All that color, all those beautiful costumes. — Tracie Bennett