Tube Quotes

“Last night, Good Friday night, at the bottom of the escalator at King’s X tube, a weasel-faced man in uniform was sweeping up rubbish with a wide broom, drink cartons, cigarette packets with all the dust and filthy scraps of the day which he pushed towards an elegant long black glove that was lying there. I expected him to pick it up as I would have – I thought of picking it up, but was too late. He smothered it in a wide sweep. It seemed to me extraordinary and shocking that he had no feeling for it. Several images went through my mind, a symbolic hand, a dead blackbird, an ornamental bookmark fallen from a lectern Bible – any once-precious relic being tumbled in the dirt. As I went up the escalator I remembered the Tatterdemallion whom I haven’t seen for months and thought of his body, if he were to die in the tube, being tumbled about with the rest of the thrown-away rubbish.” David Thomson, In Camden Town”

“I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper. ...The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc. ...I did not think I investigated. ...I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else. ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded. ...There is much to do, and I am busy, very”

“Funny how nobody talks on the tubes, isn't it? I rarely catch the tube myself, or lifts. Confined spaces, everybody shuts down. Why is that? Perhaps we think everybody on the tube is a potential psychopath or a drunk,so we close down and pretend to read a book or something.”

“I woke up feeling alone, so lonely. The night before, I had cried myself to sleep. I lay there on the floor, listening to the tube trains passing beneath me. I thought, All those hundreds and thousands and millions of people. London, London - I hate you. I picked myself up and got ready.”

“My first project was to build an ionization gauge control circuit for Professor Edgar Everhart's Cockcroft-Walton accelerator. In those days, vacuum tubes were the active components in electronic circuits. I can still recall the warm orange glow of the vacuum tube filaments and the cool blue glow of the thyratron tubes.”

“I think that there are those who write of life being a skip on the sidewalk, a chocolate bar, a bowl of cherries... the problem with that is it ends up disappointing people. Because life is more like being on the tube in London; you never really know what could happen! But then there are those people who bring a box of chocolates to eat on the tube...so life, it isn't a skip on the sidewalk, but it is a matter of strength: "Can I bring my bowl of cherries to feast on while I stand here in the gutter?" that's the essence of life. Can you still put on your rose-colored glasses while your eyes are filled with tears, and see everything in rosy colors? That's the strength that fuels a true life. Can you think to bring your little box of chocolates with you while you sit on the tube running under the streets of London? Because you should. Because even if you don't know anybody, and you don't know what's gonna happen next, you should have your box of chocolates with you. You should eat your bowl of cherries. And that is what life is.”

“When I was in the hospital they gave me apple juice every morning, even after I told them I didn't like it. I had to get even. One morning, I poured the apple juice into the specimen tube. The nurse held it up and said, 'It's a little cloudy.' I took the tube from her and said, 'Let me run it through again,' and drank it. The nurse fainted.”

“In science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to phrenology than to physics. For evolutionary biology is a historical science, laden with history's inevitable imponderables. We evolutionary biologists cannot generate a Cretaceous Park to observe exactly what killed the dinosaurs; and, unlike "harder" scientists, we usually cannot resolve issues with a simple experiment, such as adding tube A to tube B and noting the color of the mixture.”

“When I was commissioning a brand new solar photovoltaic utility site, I came across metal tubes installed into the fuseholders that were marked up as 100 amp fuses on the diagram. Needless to say, it had already gone on fire.”

“So many television marriages -that playing out of lives against a background of the tube.Instead of two lives filing the room,There are their two lives and the eleven o'clock news withConstant commercial interruption.Instead of what you say and what I say.You don't laugh with me;I don't laugh with you.All the wit comes pouring out of the tube.And we laugh at it together.The more we avoid talkingthe more passive the relationship becomes.Television permits us to walk through lifewith minor speaking parts.And the more we fail to speak,the more difficult speaking becomes”