Quotes & Sayings About Cornell

Decades of behavioral blunders and ill-conceived marriages and businesses run amok had left next to nothing by the time Leonard was in high school. He'd wangled himself an engineering scholarship to Cornell and then a job with Dow Chemical during a time he referred to, reverently, as the Dawn of the Absorbency Revolution. — Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

[I]t's necessary to exert very great foresight every time you go to blame or praise a man, so that you won't speak incorrectly ... For you shouldn't suppose that, while stones are sacred and pieces of wood, and birds, and snakes, human beings are not. Rather of all these things, the most sacred is the good human being, while the most polluted is the wicked.
Speech attributed to Socrates in Plato, Minos 319a, trans. Thomas L. Pangle, in The Roots of Political Philosophy: Ten Forgotten Socratic Dialogues, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 63. — Plato

You his brother?'
'Yes, damn it!' I burst out. "And all I want is to get my hands on whoever did this to him!'
'Funny,' said a dick dryly, 'but so do we.'
I didn't like him much after that. Sarcasm is out of place when a man has just been brought face to face with personal tragedy.
("Walls That Hear You") — Cornell Woolrich

The old frame house down near the waterfront had never held so many people since the day it was put up. It must have been a pleasant place fifty years before: trees overhanging the limpid water, cows grazing in the meadows on both sides of the river, little frame houses like this one dotting the banks here and there.
It wasn't a pleasant place any more: garbage scows, coal yards, the river a greasy gray soup. Dead-end blocks of decrepit tenements on one side of it, lumberyards and ice-plants and tall stacks on the other.
The house was set far back from the street, hemmed in by the blank walls that rose around it.
("I Wouldn't Be In Your Shoes") — Cornell Woolrich

In this place, upwards of 400,000
British men were going to be killed. They'd lost 20,000
just the other day. He sucked a grim smile. It was like
rich countries deliberately killing themselves, leaving
their battered remains ready for the revolution that would surely come, for who could return home without
wanting to face those who had wasted good men thus? — Paul Cornell

I am practical by nature, and I'd heard that being a writer or an artist is a good way to starve! So I was an economics major at Oklahoma State, and then received an M.S. from Cornell in Agricultural Resource and Managerial Economics. I knew if I wanted to write I would do it on my own, but I knew I wouldn't make myself study economics on my own. — Ally Carter

Just inside the doorway he puts down the bags, motions her to stand by them a minute. He saunters out ahead, carefully casual. Peers up one way, down the other. Nothing. The street's dead to the world.
Then suddenly, from nowhere, ping! Something flicks off the wall just behind him, flops at his feet like a dead bug. He doesn't bend down to look closer, he can tell what kind of a bug it is all right. He's seen that kind of bug before, plenty of times. No flash, no report, to show which direction it came from. Silencer, of course.
He hasn't moved. Fsssh! and a bee or wasp in a hurry strokes by his cheek, tingles, draws a drop of slow blood. Another pokk! from the wall, another bug rolling over. The insect-world seems very streamlined, very self-destructive, tonight. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

There is nothing I have to reflect on that gives me more satisfaction than the fact that my life is insured for the benefit of my Dear Wife and children. — Ezra Cornell

My freshman year of high school I joined the chess and math clubs. — Eric Allin Cornell

The Concerned Photographer produces images in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism. — Cornell Capa

Small wins are exactly what they sound like, and are part of how keystone habits create widespread changes. A huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves. "Small wins are a steady application of a small advantage," one Cornell professor wrote in 1984. "Once a small win has been accomplished, forces are set in motion that favor another small win."4.14 Small wins fuel transformative changes by leveraging tiny advantages into patterns that convince people that bigger achievements are within reach. — Charles Duhigg

On hands and knees the figure comes pacing along beside the wall that flanks the patio, lithe, sinuous, knife in mouth perpendicular to its course. In moonlight and out of it, as each successive archway of the portico circles high above it, comes down to join its support, and is gone again to the rear.
The moon is a caress on supple skin. The moon of Anahuac understands, the moon is in league, the moon will not betray. ("The Moon of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

Cornell University Press announced plans for a festschrift. — David Foster Wallace

Men's loyalty to their women dies hard - and almost always too late. ("I'm Dangerous Tonight") — Cornell Woolrich

I don't think there are too many rock bands in history that can look at the beginning and middle and ending of themselves and see what I see when I think of Soundgarden. I think from the beginning through the middle and the end it was such a perfect ride and such a perfect legacy to leave, — Chris Cornell

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.
He was. He was going to shake hands with death.
He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.
("3 Kills For 1") — Cornell Woolrich

But it doesn't happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

I don't think [Russell T Davies] sits up at night worrying about canonicity, except for the times when I'm pretty sure he does. — Paul Cornell

Three o'clock in the morning.
The highway is empty, under a malignant moon. The oil drippings make the roadway gleam like a blue-satin ribbon. The night is still but for a humming noise coming up somewhere behind a rise of ground.
Two other, fiercer, whiter moons, set close together, suddenly top the rise, shoot a fan of blinding platinum far down ahead of them. Headlights. The humming burgeons into a roar. The touring car is going so fast it sways from side to side. The road is straight. The way is long. The night is short. (Jane Brown's Body) — Cornell Woolrich

That air of electric tension, of a great city on the edge of an abyss, is more noticeable than ever at the White Russian cabaret called, not inappropriately, "New York." You wouldn't know you were in China. An almond-eyed platinum-blonde has just finished wailing, with a Mott Street accent, "You're gonna lose your gal." ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

I had a pretty bad time when I was an undergraduate at Cornell University. I failed out of school. I was much, much heavier. — Victor LaValle

The portieres were drawn across the French windows now, veiling the stars outside - that were there nevertheless. ("Speak To Me Of Death") — Cornell Woolrich

Another benefit of going to Cornell is that 90 percent of your friends are doctors. — Ato Essandoh

I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern. — Eric Allin Cornell

Our stories may not always be pleasant as they're being lived. They can in fact be just the opposite, acquiring a warm hue only in retrospect. "I think this boils down to a philosophical question rather than a psychological one," Tom Gilovich, a professor of psychology at Cornell, tells me. "Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?" He says he has no answer for this, but the example he offers suggests a bias. — Jennifer Senior

I have a fine lot of telescopes. I have one with which I can see the Mountains in the Moon. — Ezra Cornell

I'm sure I could start a band tomorrow that would have different influences and would want to do something completely different than anything I've done. — Chris Cornell

Here lies the body of Colonel Cornell's. The rest of the fellow, I fancy, in hell is. — Mark Hodder

I circled among the narrow, San Franciscan streets of Mt. Adams until night fell, then dropped down St. Martin's to Paradrome and up to Ida, where I parked beneath an arching willow some three houses down from Tray Leach's home. I'd bought five styrofoam cups full of coffee at a little grocery on St. Regis, and, as I sat there watching the western sky go purple and then deep blue, I flipped the plastic lid off one of them. It was bad, bitter coffee. But I was feeling numb and disoriented after Cornell Street and I had to keep alert all night long. — Jonathan Valin

New York. The world's most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Then without any warning the car stopped. They were there.
"The ride's over," someone said. "End of the ride."
For a moment nobody got out. They just sat there. The driver cut the ignition, and after that there was silence. Complete, uncanny silence, more frightening than the most threatening noise or violence could have been. Night silence. A silence that had death in it. ("The Number's Up") — Cornell Woolrich

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. This is the famous study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in New York mentioned a few chapters ago that launched the new science of what we might call Stupidology. It — Bill Bryson

When she comes down to supper I don't like her any better; in fact, a hell of a lot less. She's put on a shiny dress, all fishscales, like this was still India or the boat. On her head she's put a sort of beaded cap that fits close-like a hood. A mottled green-and-black thing that gleams dully in the candlelight. Not a hair shows below it, you can't tell whether she's a woman or what the devil she is. Right in front, above her forehead, there's a sort of question-mark worked into it, in darker beads. You can't be sure what it is, but it's shaped like a question mark. ("Kiss of the Cobra") — Cornell Woolrich

The fuel for imagination comes from the feeling in your heart. — Charles A. Cornell

Monsters were one thing. She was used to monsters, she could deal with monsters. A noise in the darkness, with nothing attached to it, was another. — Paul Cornell

All guys are scared of each other, didn't you know that? I'm not the only one. We're all born afraid.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers, calorimeters, what have you. — Eric Allin Cornell

When you start your first band and it has an impact on the rest of the world you go through a lot with those guys and you become very protective of that legacy. — Chris Cornell

The struggle doesn't last long; it's too unequal. Their momentary surprise overcome, they close in on him. The well-directed slice of a gun-butt slackens the good arm; it's easy to pry the disabled one from around the racketeer's collar.
Tereshko is trembling with his anger. 'Now him again!' he protests, as though at an injustice. 'All they do is die and then get up and walk around again! What'sa matter, you guys using spitballs for slugs? No, don't kick at him, that'll never do it - I think the guy has nine lives!' ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

Zombies don't discriminate; they'll eat any brain they can sink their infected teeth into. I'm sure my unique brain tastes the same as a normal brain. Actually, mine might be slightly tastier. -Jordan — J. Cornell Michel

Kevin Cornell and I have worked together a bunch. — Mac Barnett

I don't get in there and create a character. It's more of a voice that I hear living inside the music. — Chris Cornell

Children should always feel like the adults are living in this world to nurture them, to take care of them, to protect them from any bad thing that might come. — Chris Cornell

I read the book with interest, but when Jackson was a candidate in 1828 for the Presidency, I opposed him and voted for Adams. I favored a protective tariff. — Ezra Cornell

You need to have dreams. Everything starts with a dream. — Sheila Cornell-Douty

What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man's life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

The words you say never live up to the words in your head. — Chris Cornell

At Cornell, my acting teacher said you cannot be religious and be an artist. I sort of got it, because faith is a comfort and art comes from a lot of places, in a lot of people, from the dark chasm. — Catherine Hicks

The girl's face was the color of talcum. Her uncle's was a death mask, a bone structure overlaid by parchment. Shane's was granite, with a glistening line of sweat just below his hair line. He'd never forget this night, the detective knew, no matter what else happened for the rest of his life. They were all getting scars on their souls, the sort of scars people got in the Dark Ages, when they believed in devils and black magic. ("Speak To Me Of Death") — Cornell Woolrich

Sweetness peppered with spice. A smidgen of naughtiness with the nice. Toss in some goofiness with the smart. Throw in some strength to support the heart. Cupfuls of love to even it all out and tenaciousness sprinkled in to combat the doubt. Cook over some fire to meld it all in and you've got one good woman underneath this skin. 2012 — Jenna Cornell

For the first time in three years, Travis Cornell felt needed, felt a deep connection with another living creature. For the first time in three years, he had a reason to live. He — Dean Koontz

True healing is not physical - it is a spiritual awakening to our True Self. If art is used for that purpose then it can be quite healing as it purifies the mind of thoughts that create disease. — Judith Cornell

Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.
If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.
("For The Rest Of Her Life") — Cornell Woolrich

Actors are as anxious about the state of audiences as aviators are over weather conditions. — Katharine Cornell

I tried to go back and talk about what I did know. I told her about one girl he'd brought home from Cornell; I'd asked if she was his girlfriend, and he's said, When you define something, you limit it. — Melissa Bank

Winfree came from a family in which no one had gone to college. He got started, he would say, by not having proper education. His father, rising from the bottom of the life insurance business to the level of vice president, moved family almost yearly up and down the East Coast, and Winfree attended than a dozen schools before finishing high school. He developed a feeling that the interesting things in the world had to do with biology and mathematics and a companion feeling that no standard combination of the two subjects did justice to what was interesting. So he decided not to take a standard approach. He took a five-year course in engineering physics at Cornell University, learning applied mathematics and a full range of hands-on laboratory styles. Prepared to be hired into military-industrial complex, he got a doctorate in biology, striving to combine experiment with theory in new ways. — James Gleick

ran - at separate times - a boutique investment banking firm and a small mortgage company. He served as the Treasurer for the multinational vitamin manufacturer USANA Health Sciences years before becoming CFO for MonaVie. Devin squeezed in two brief stints in government, including two years working for Jake Garn on the U.S. Senate Banking Committee Staff and another year working for an independent state agency called USTAR, where he helped foster technology entrepreneurship during Governor Jon Huntsman's administration. Devin is proud to be a Ute, having graduated from the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, which recognized him as a Distinguished Alum in 2006. He also earned an MBA at Cornell University where he ran the student newspaper, Cornell Business. — Devin D. Thorpe

Business after all is a form of warfare; you bring all your available weapons to bear. If you don't you're a fool. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

You haven't any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink with, laugh with, borrow money from, lend money to, stay away from their special girls as you want them to stay away from yours, and above all, never break your word to, once it's been given.
And that is all the obligation you have, all you have the right to expect.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Most frontmen are not born hams like David Lee Roth. We're more like Joey Ramone: awkward geeks who somehow find our place in the world on the stage. — Chris Cornell

Evans made himself their spokesman. "Charlie and Joe," he offered. "Remember us? We brought a friend back with us this time." Girls evidently didn't count in this little subdivision of the underworld; a miscalculation many a shady character has made. — Cornell Woolrich

That's a man's vital spot, the helpless thing he loves. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

A first-rate college library with a comfortable campus around it is a fine milieu for a writer. There is, of course, the problem of educating the young. I remember how once, between terms, not at Cornell, a student brought a transistor set with him into the reading room. He managed to state that one, he was playing "classical" music; that two, he was doing it "softly"; and that three, "there were not many readers around in summer." I was there, a one-man multitude. — Vladimir Nabokov

I am not an artist, and I never intended to be one. I hope I have made some good photographs, but what I really hope is that I have done some good photo stories with memorable images that make a point, and, perhaps, even make a difference. — Cornell Capa

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out - everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We're going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.
("New York Blues") — Cornell Woolrich

Maldonado's face was ghastly. 'That' she said, pointing below the bed where the cat lurked, 'and that' - pointing to what lay on the floor - 'prove it was no dream. Do dreams leave marks behind them?' ("I'm Dangerous Tonight") — Cornell Woolrich

The brilliant escape, the funny line to cap it, despite the lack of timing. And the girl was still dead. The last act had not materialised. The world, and himself, remained so far from what they should be: so imperfect. — Paul Cornell

I turned away from him and went on my way, up the street and about my business. The past was dead. The future was resignation, fatality, and could only end one way now. The present was numbness, that could feel nothing. Like Novocaine needled into your heart. What was there in all the dimensions of time for me? ("Life Is Weird Sometimes" first chapter of unpublished novel THE LOSER) — Cornell Woolrich

I got in touch with the creative process between the age of 14 and 16, mainly because I was alone so much. — Chris Cornell

I think it's important for fans to know that but if I'm doing something that inspires me musically then I think it will inspire someone else too. — Chris Cornell

In 1844, there was a balance of perhaps of a couple of thousand dollars on the cr side. — Ezra Cornell

There wasn't a key moment when I knew I wanted to quit. — Chris Cornell

I want to go where I can be of the most service to the general enterprise. — Ezra Cornell

During my freshman year at Cornell, I joined my dorm's intramural football team. At the first practice, upper classmen pointed out I was tall, so I should try playing QB. Well half an hour later, it was abundantly clear that I should not be the QB. — David Einhorn

After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out as quickly as it had begun. — Eric Allin Cornell

To me, music shouldn't be ego-driven. When you go out on stage and play songs, it is. But when you're sitting in a room, writing songs, it's a completely different process. It's a completely different place. It's a creative place, a musical place. It has nothing to do with who likes what. — Chris Cornell

My head was always bubbling over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious and omnivorous reading habits. — Eric Allin Cornell

O'Shaughnessy is hitting Denholt on the side of his head with his free arm, great, walloping, pile-driver blows. The two of them stagger together, like partners in a crazy dance. Glass is breaking all around them. Gray smoke from the six shots, pink-and-white dust from the chipped brick-and-plaster walls, swirl around them in a rainbow haze. Something vividly green flares up from one of the overturned retorts, goes right out again. O'Shaughnessy tears the emptied gun away, flings it off somewhere. More breaking glass, and this time a tart pungent smell that makes the nostrils sting. The crunch of pulverized tube glass underfoot makes it sound as if they were scuffling in sand or hard-packed snow. ("Jane Brown's Body") — Cornell Woolrich

Each unto himself has his own world that he looks out upon, and though someone else were to stand on the very selfsame inch of ground your feet were placed upon, guided by chalk marks, he would not see the same things you did. — Cornell Woolrich

I don't really go to clubs so I don't know what sounds are made there, — Chris Cornell

I saw Joseph Cornell's lyrical work for the first time at the Museum of Modern Art in the late seventies and have internalized many of his boxes. — Siri Hustvedt

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin. — Cornell Woolrich

I had always loved Joseph Cornell and wanted to do something with dioramas. — Marcel Dzama

There can be no freedom of the individual, no democracy, without the capital system, the profit system, the private enterprise system. These are, in the end, inseparable. Those who would destroy freedom have only first to destroy the hope of gain, the profit of enterprise and risk-taking, the hope of accumulating capital, the hope to save something for one's old age and for one's children. For a community of men without property, and without the hope of getting it by honest effort, is a community of slaves of a despotic State. — Russell Cornell Leffingwell

Sometimes love creeps upon me, and I suddenly sort of just realise that it's there when i start shaving my legs every day and singing on my bicycle. — Paul Cornell

(On Captain Britain) Every British person thinks he's got the same accent as them. The air around him is warm like a summer meadow. He smells of honey. I've seen grown men weep at the sight of him. — Paul Cornell

It's hard to say goodbye for good at any time or any place. It's harder still to say it through a meshed wire. It crisscrossed his face into little diagonals, gave me only little broken-up molecules of it at a time. It stenciled a cold, rigid frame around every kiss. — Cornell Woolrich

The idea of parts of the body public fighting each other was like the idea of a man's punching himself in the face. It was a physical blasphemy that suited this era as an index of how far it had all gone. — Paul Cornell

Stories are about endings,' he'd said. 'They don't mean anything unless they come to an end. — Paul Cornell

I wasn't that good you know. What I was was a guy who could write a little, publishing in magazines surrounded by people who couldn't write at all. So I looked pretty good. But I never thought I was that good at all. All that I thought was that I tried to tell the truth. — Cornell Woolrich

You hear stories like that all your life and think: cool, a ghost bus. But now we have to look at this stuff analytically ... a ghost bus?! The "ghost" of a motor vehicle? A public conveyance, presumably, which didn't head towards the light, move on to join the choir invisible in ... bus heaven, the great terminus in the sky, where all good buses go when they ... I don't know, break down, but instead is doomed to ... drive eternally the streets of Earth! How can there be a ghost bus?! — Paul Cornell

Gosh, it's easy!' he marveled, open-mouthed. 'I never knew before how easy it is to kill anyone! Twenty years to grow 'em, and all it takes is one little push!'
He was suddenly drunk with some new kind of power, undiscovered until this minute. The power of life and death over his fellowmen! Everyone had it, everyone strong enough to raise a violent arm, but they were afraid to use it. Well, he wasn't! And here he'd been going around for weeks living from hand to mouth, without any money, without enough food, when everything he wanted lay within his reach all the while! He had been green all right, and no mistake about it!
Death had become familiar. At seven it had been the most mysterious thing in the world to him, by midnight it was already an old story. ("Dusk To Dawn") — Cornell Woolrich

I'm not usually in a talkative mode. — Chris Cornell

Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history. — Cornell Capa

A raging, glowering full moon had come up, was peering down over the side of the sky well above the patio.
That was the last thing she saw as she leaned for a moment, inert with fatigue, against the doorway of the room in which her child lay. Then she dragged herself in to topple headlong upon the bed and, already fast asleep, to circle her child with one protective arm, moving as if of its own instinct.
Not the meek, the pallid, gentle moon of home. This was the savage moon that had shone down on Montezuma and Cuauhtemoc, and came back looking for them now. The primitive moon that had once looked down on terraced heathen cities and human sacrifices. The moon of Anahuac. ("The Moon Of Montezuma") — Cornell Woolrich

With every passing year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us. — Eric Allin Cornell

I'm just trying to do my part to save the world. — J. Cornell Michel

I have a hard time narrowing things down to ten or 12 songs. If I walk off stage in anything less than two hours, it just feels strange. It feels early. — Chris Cornell

Due to irresolvable personality conflicts as well as musical differences, I am permanently leaving the band Audioslave. I wish the other three members nothing but the best in all of their future endeavours. — Chris Cornell

Lizzie had come to understand that Sue's mission in life was to say the things that she, or indeed anyone else, wouldn't or couldn't. — Paul Cornell