Scraps Quotes

“While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it.”

“Being a billionaire helps when you live in a slum and have to eat scraps of food and drink dirty water.”

“I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the places where life stores its scraps.”

“Only two people knew this side of her—herself, and the one who had created it; the one who made her secretly loathe herself, made her feel used and dirty and broken—like tarnished scraps of silver. These night-time reminders made her too aware that like those silver scraps, even if she were somehow melded into something whole, she would be new—never the same as she once was. Never unbroken.”

“I have diligently disciplined my life to search out life’s gifts in the very places where society mistakenly says life stores its scraps. And I am constantly amazed that in the treasure trove that surrounds me, I stand in the company of so few.”

“Positive attitude enables you to go with passion and see possibility in every challenging circumstance. It was by that, that great achievers picked up metal scraps on the floor and saw machines built from it.”

“Bird asked what a paleontologist was and Mom said that if he took a complete, illustrated guide to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shred it into a hundred pieces, cast them into the wind from the museum’s steps, let a few weeks pass, went back and scoured Fifth Avenue and Central Park for as many surviving scraps as he could find, then tried to reconstruct the history of painting, including schools, styles, genres, and names of painters from his scraps, that would be like a paleontologist.”

“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”

“They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”

“My brain hums with scraps of poetry and madness.”