Lyall Quotes & Sayings

Genes which allow females to be less inhibited leave fewer copies of themselves than genes which persuade them to remain highly selective. Among males, the best strategy is exactly the opposite one. The maximum advantage goes to those males with the fewest inhibitions. "Love 'em and leave 'em" is not so much a nasty peice of male chauvinist piggery as an accurate reflection of biological reality. — Lyall Watson

The whole damn thing started when they gave women the vote. — Gavin Lyall

Lyall understood a broken heart, but it could not be allowed to rumple perfectly good shirtwaists. — Gail Carriger

Even the cleanest air, at the centre of the South Pacific or somewhere over Antarctica, has two hundred thousand assorted bits and pieces in every lungful. And this count rises to two million or more in the thick of the Serengeti migration, or over a six-lane highway during rush hour in downtown Los Angeles. — Lyall Watson

If you simply walk on the beach as we are doing, you have no special color. But if you travel with a purpose, it is different. When you go somewhere important or you return home from a long journey, you build a shape around you and it reaches out ahead to touch your destination. — Lyall Watson

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos. — Lyall Watson

All the London ton acknowledged Scotland as a barbaric place. The packs there cared very little for the social niceties of daytime folk. Highland werewolves had a reputation for doing atrocious and highly unwarranted things, like wearing smoking jackets to the dinner table. Lyall shivered at the delicious horror of the very idea. — Gail Carriger

Lord Maccon looked up. "Grovel, you say?"
Lyall did not glance away from the latest vampire report he was perusing. "Grovel, my lord. — Gail Carriger

Professor Lyall looked modestly proud. "I am considered a bit of an expert on the procreative practices of Ovis orientalis aries."
"Sheep?"
"Sheep."
"Sheep!" Madame Lefoux's voice came over suddenly high, as though she were suppressing an inclination to giggle.
"Yes, as in baaaa." Professor Lyall frowned. Sheep were a serious business, and he failed to see the source of Madame Lefoux's amusement.
"Let me understand this correctly. You are a werewolf with a keen interest in sheep breeding?" A little bit of French accent trickled into Madame Lefoux's speech in her glee.
Professor Lyall continued bravely on, ignoring her flippancy. "I preserve the nonviable embryo in formaldehyde for future study. Lord Maccon has been drinking my samples. When confronted, he admitted to enjoying both the refreshing beverage and the 'crunchy picked snack' as well. I was not pleased. — Gail Carriger

Lyall had spent centuries nibbling about the great layered cake that was polite society while Lord Akeldama acted the part of the frosting on its top. — Gail Carriger

Lyall felt he could not say which of two things was harder to put up with, the Abbot's conversational style, with its bland coherence and assumption of severely limited cogitative powers in the hearer, or his recurrent look of pleased surprise as each fresh piece of evidence of his wisdom or moral worth turned up, but between them they were likely to implant in certain minds a hardy seed of revolt. — Kingsley Amis

The limits of sensory evolution in fish are defined very largely by their habitat. Water is physically supportive, carries some kinds of odour well, and is kind to sound - letting it travel several times faster than air will allow, but it inhibits other more personal kinds of communication. — Lyall Watson

He dinna act like an Alpha."
"He does in some areas. — Gail Carriger

One of these days I would give Pratt and Whitney back this engine and they could send it round airports as an advertisement, wearing a little brass plate reading This engine actually worked in this condition thus enabling Bill Cary to work in his condition. If you, too, are an idiot, P & W engines may save you from yourself. — Gavin Lyall

Both dance and dream are brought into being by the consciousness of a moment. They can never be repeated or successfully imitated. But you can dance and dream again. You must, if life is to continue. — Lyall Watson

Professor Lyall, cursing his Alpha for departing so precipitously, balled up the piece of paper and, after minor consideration for the delicacy of the information it contained, ate it. — Gail Carriger

Ivy returned his direct gaze with a particularly innocent smile. "The great advantage," she said, "of being thought silly, is that people forget and begin to think one might also be foolish. I may, Professor Lyall, be a trifle enthusiastic in my manner and dress, but I am no fool. — Gail Carriger

Seriously, a smaller, leaner, cleaner, tuskless and more secretive elephant is exactly what is needed. It definitely would live longer. — Lyall Watson

Smell was our first sense. It is even possible that being able to smell was the stimulus that took a primitive fish and turned a small lump of olfactory tissue on its nerve cord into a brain. We think because we smelled. — Lyall Watson

Before sight and sound hijacked our attention, we shared with all life a sort of common sense, a chemical sense that depended on direct contact with matter in the water or the air. — Lyall Watson

"Just try and remember," I said slowly," that if God had intended men to fly He'd have given us wings. So all flying is flying in the face of nature. It's unnatural, wicked and stuffed with risks all the time. The secret to flying is learning to minimize the risks." "Or perhaps - the secret of life is to choose your risks?" — Gavin Lyall

Lord Maccon, being Lord Maccon and good at such things, then changed, right there in the Thames, from dog-paddling wolf to large man treading water. He did so flawlessly, so that his head never went under the water. Professor Lyall suspected him of practicing such maneuvers in the bathtub. — Gail Carriger

Opinionated writing is always the most difficult ... simply because it involves retaining in the cold morning-after crystal of the printed word the burning flow of molten feeling. — Gavin Lyall

Why? I mean, why you? I can perfectly comprehend not liking my husband. I dislike him intensely most of the time."
Professor Lyall stifled a chuckle. "I am given to understand that he does not approve of spelling one' s name with two ll's. He finds it inexcusably Welsh. I suspect he may be quite taken with you, however. — Gail Carriger

In terms of the Richter scale this defeat was a force 8 gale. — John Lyall

Lord Maccon, might we have words on the proper tying of a cravat? For my sanity's sake?
Lord Maccon was nonplussed. Professor Lyall, on the other hand, was pained. "I do what I can." Lord Akeldama looked at him, pity in his eyes. "You are a brave man. — Gail Carriger

If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. — Lyall Watson

My petal.
Westminster's toy had tea issues. Thank Biffy and Lyall. Toodle pip.
A. — Gail Carriger

Football is in my blood. For me the bubbles will never fade and die — John Lyall

Biffy said, off the cuff, "Or we could find a replacement queen."
"Volunteering for the position?"
"Why, Professor, is that wittiness I detect?"
"Only for you."
"Charmer." Biffy tapped him on the arm playfully. — Gail Carriger

I have had close relationships with three species of wild pigs, each a chance encounter on a different continent, and all continue to enrich my life in surprising ways. — Lyall Watson

I Preserve the nonviable embryo in formaldehyde for future study. Lord Maccon has been drinking my samples. When confronted, he admitted to be enjoying both the refreshing beverage and the 'crunchy pickled snack' as well. I was not pleased (Professor Lyall to Madame Lefoux) — Gail Carriger

Smell is a long-distance sense, a way of stretching time and finding out in advance what lies ahead. — Lyall Watson

Professor Lyall said, "His lordship did say something about dealing with an embarrassing family emergency." "Am I not family?" wondered Lady Maccon. To which Lyall muttered under his breath, "And often embarrassing. — Gail Carriger

All I do is look, listen and try to make sense of what I find, in biological terms. — Lyall Watson

Breathing air is a liberating experience. It freed our ancestors from the constraints of staying wet or having to remain within easy reach of water for refuge, respiration or reproduction. But the biggest change it made in our lives was to expose us to a whole new range of sensory experience. — Lyall Watson

Even in the lives of fishes, sensation is seldom a matter of one thing or another. Senses overlap. The lines between them often tend to be blurred, and the best that we can manage, by way of description from the outside, is to say that the senses of fishes appear to dominate one at a time. — Lyall Watson

Lyall's face went deadpan as he relayed the details, as those who are tortured or raped will become when they retell the pattern of abuse — Gail Carriger

I kissed her," he explained, aggrieved.
"Mmm, yes, I had the dubious pleasure of witnessing that, ah-hem, overly public occurrence." Lyall sharpened his pen nib, using a small copper blade that ejected from the end of his glassicals.
"Well! Why hasn't she done anything about it?" the Alpha wanted to know.
"You mean like whack you upside the noggin with that deadly parasol of hers? I would be cautious in that area if I were you. — Gail Carriger

We share our planet quite naturally with a permanent aeroplankton; a buoyant ecology too soft to hear, too small to see, but heavy with mood and meaning. Imagine being aware of all these airy inclusions - and you can begin to understand how it might feel to be able to smell really well. — Lyall Watson

Oh, Professor Lyall, are you making a funny? It doesn't suit you."
The sandy-haired Beta gave Lady Maccon a dour look. "I am exploring new personality avenues."
"Well, stop it."
"Yes, my lady. — Gail Carriger

You never know about the deaths you didn't die: the mountain peaks you missed, the collisions that didn't happen. It's a warm, cosy feeling. It's the way the airlines fly. — Gavin Lyall

Lord Macon:"Went for a wee nightly run. Needed peace and quiet. Needed air in my fur. Needed fields under my paws. Needed, oh I canna -hic- explain ... needed the company of hegehogs."
Professor Lyall:"And did you find it?"
Lord Macon:"Find what? No hedgehogs. Stupid hedgehogs. — Gail Carriger

We try to abolish intervals by our manic insistence on keeping busy, on doing something. And as a result, all we succeed in doing is destroying all hope of tranquility ... You have to learn to immerse yourself in the silences between. — Lyall Watson

Air is traditionally 'thin,' but the more we learn about our atmosphere, the more substantial it becomes. In some places it is so filled with inorganic flotsam that it is almost thick enough to plough; in others, it has become so primed with the by-products of life that it comes close to being a living tissue in its own right. — Lyall Watson

What did you do?" "Well, you see, there was this pot of tea, simply sitting there ... " He trailed off.
"Useful thing, tea," commented Lyall thoughtfully. — Gail Carriger

If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense. — Lyall Watson

It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right. — Lyall Watson

I live and work alone and travel light, relying largely on my memory and making a point of letting intuition guide my way. — Lyall Watson

Smell is stimulating. It stirs things up and makes us nostalgic - a wonderful word which literally means 'ache for home' - which serves to inspire new circuits in the brain. — Lyall Watson