R.H. Tawney Quotes

“Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.”

“Stop telling such outlandish tales. Stop turning minnows into whales.”

“I'm solitary as a pulled tooth,Lonely as an unwelcome truth, Lost as a minnow out of school, A genius in a crop of fools.”

“On a visit to the space program, President Kennedy asked me about the satellite. I told him that it would be more important than sending a man into space. “Why?” he asked. “Because,” I said, “this satellite will send ideas into space, and ideas last longer than men.”

“You are a bit like that painting, Minnow. Remember how lovingly and carefully formed you are. Your thoughts, your talents, your memories, your mistakes.... they all make the complete canvas of you. Even though others may mistake your worth, you must never value yourself any less.”

“Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation...to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.”

“He didn't really care if they felt that way or not: he just needed them to say it, he needed to feel that something lay beneath their imperturbable calm, that somewhere within them ran a thin stream of quick, cool water, teeming with delicate lives, minnows and grasses and tiny white flowers, all tender and easily wounded and so vulnerable you couldn't see them without aching for them.”

“They appeared to me like a thin veil of mist, translucent, almost- not quite there. But for all their misty peculiarity, they were as clear to me as the minnows in the shallows and the foxgloves on the riverbank and the butterflies fanning their wings. They flitted from flower to flower, as swift as dragonflies, sometimes glowing brightly like a candle flame suddenly catching, sometimes fading like a breath of warm air on glass, so that you would never know they had been there at all. Yet there they were. And there I was, watching them.”

“The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.It is the night sea journey, the lone fisherman on a tropical sea with his nets, and you let these nets down - sometimes, something tears through them that leaves them in shreds and you just row for shore, and put your head under your bed and pray. At other times what slips through are the minutiae, the minnows of this ichthyological metaphor of idea chasing.But, sometimes, you can actually bring home something that is food, food for the human community that we can sustain ourselves on and go forward.”

“After centuries of silence, someone or something was lying outside on the stone step . . . “Are you deaf?” Death asked arriving abruptly with screams and cries and a fetid smell of rotting matter filling the room.“Why are you here?” the Old Crone asked, knowing the answer before she asked the question. “Go away.”“When someone knocks you’re supposed to open the door!” Death said, coughing as though she had swallowed a lot of water.“What are you doing here?” the Old Crone asked again “and why are you amorphous? Show yourself! I don’t like it when you look like nothing at all.”“Open the door!” Death rasped, appearing as a drowned cat coughing up minnows and river detritus. “Our future depends upon it!”