Dava Sobel Quotes

#1. Any clock that can track this sideral schedule proves itself as perfect as God's magnificent clockwork.
Dava Sobel

Dava Sobel

#2. They had discovered one could grow as hungry for light as for food.

Stephen King

#3. You have this thing called a life. It's only you that gets to live it and you only get to do it one time.

Cecily Anne Paterson

#4. I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

Ruth Rendell

#5. When the government sees a poor area, its solution is to move the poor out.

Greg Gutfeld

#6. One degree of longitude equals four minutes of time the world over, but in terms of distance, one degree shrinks from sixty-eight miles at the Equator to virtually nothing at the poles.

Dava Sobel

#7. He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch.

Dava Sobel

#8. The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.

Dava Sobel

#9. Everyone is naked under his clothes and everyone is a foreigner outside his native lands.

Gisli Palsson

#10. Whoever climbed the Lord's mountain had to possess clean hands and an innocent heart; otherwise the Summit would kill him. Today the doorway is deserted. Soiled hands and sinful hearts are able to pass by without fear, for the Summit kills no longer.

Nikos Kazantzakis

#11. To belittle romance fiction is to belittle women. To read romance fiction is to confront the strength of women, the variety of their experience, and the validity of their aspirations and achievements.

Judith Arnold

#12. Having established itself securely on shipboard, the chronometer was soon taken for granted, like any other essential thing, and the whole question of its contentious history, along with the name of its original inventor, dropped from the consciousness of the seamen who used it every day.

Dava Sobel

#13. Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them - with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly redrawn by war or peace.

Dava Sobel

#14. The British Parliament, in its famed Longitude Act of 1714, set the highest bounty of all, naming a prize equal to a king's ransom (several million dollars in today's currency) for a "Practicable and Useful" means of determining longitude.

Dava Sobel

#15. From them I had nothing to learn - one cannot cease to know what one does know.

Thomas Ligotti

#16. There are two kinds of 'disabled' persons: Those who dwell on what they have lost and those who concentrate on what they have left.

Thomas Szasz

#17. I have only two wishes," said Jean. "The first is for strong coffee, and the second is for stronger coffee.

Scott Lynch

#18. Would a watermelon in the midst of a chase sequence not be, in its own organic way, emblematic of our entire misunderstood enterprise? At once totally logical and perfectly irrational?

W. D. Richter

#19. Love the giver more than the gift.

Brigham Young

#20. In the wake of the Longitude Act, the concept of "discovering the longitude" became a synonym for attempting the impossible.

Dava Sobel