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“I look up at the sky, wondering if I'll catch a glimpse of kindness there, but I don't. All I see are indifferent summer clouds drifting over the Pacific. And they have nothing to say to me. Clouds are always taciturn. I probably shouldn't be looking up at them. What I should be looking at is inside of me. Like staring down into a deep well. Can I see kindness there? No, all I see is my own nature. My own individual, stubborn, uncooperative often self-centered nature that still doubts itself--that, when troubles occur, tries to find something funny, or something nearly funny, about the situation. I've carried this character around like an old suitcase, down a long, dusty path. I'm not carrying it because I like it. The contents are too heavy, and it looks crummy, fraying in spots. I've carried it with me because there was nothing else I was supposed to carry. Still, I guess I have grown attached to it. As you might expect.”
― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

“I feel very strongly indeed that a Cambridge education for our scientists should include some contact with the humanistic side. The gift of expression is important to them as scientists; the best research is wasted when it is extremely difficult to discover what it is all about ... It is even more important when scientists are called upon to play their part in the world of affairs, as is happening to an increasing extent.”
― Sir William Bragg

“He smelled of cigarettes and whiskey, the smell of Cambridge and youth.”
― Lily King, Euphoria

“Edward genially enough did not disagree with what I said, but he didn't seem to admit my point, either. I wanted to press him harder so I veered close enough to the ad hominem to point out that his life—the life of the mind, the life of the book collector and music lover and indeed of the gallery-goer, appreciator of the feminine and occasional boulevardier—would become simply unlivable and unthinkable in an Islamic republic. Again, he could accede politely to my point but carry on somehow as if nothing had been conceded. I came slowly to realize that with Edward, too, I was keeping two sets of books. We agreed on things like the first Palestinian intifadah, another event that took the Western press completely off guard, and we collaborated on a book of essays that asserted and defended Palestinian rights. This was in the now hard-to-remember time when all official recognition was withheld from the PLO. Together we debated Professor Bernard Lewis and Leon Wieseltier at a once-celebrated conference of the Middle East Studies Association in Cambridge in 1986, tossing and goring them somewhat in a duel over academic 'objectivity' in the wider discipline. But even then I was indistinctly aware that Edward didn't feel himself quite at liberty to say certain things, while at the same time feeling rather too much obliged to say certain other things. A low point was an almost uncritical profile of Yasser Arafat that he contributed to Interview magazine in the late 1980s.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Bottled, was he?" Said Colonel Bantry, with an Englishman's sympathy for alcoholic excess. "Oh, well, can't judge a fellow by what he does when he's drunk? When I was at Cambridge, I remember I put a certain utensil - well - well, nevermind.”
― Agatha Christie, The Body in the Library

“One day at Fenner's (the university cricket ground at Cambridge), just before the last war, G. H. Hardy and I were talking about Einstein. Hardy had met him several times, and I had recently returned from visiting him. Hardy was saying that in his lifetime there had only been two men in the world, in all the fields of human achievement, science, literature, politics, anything you like, who qualified for the Bradman class. For those not familiar with cricket, or with Hardy's personal idiom, I ought to mention that “the Bradman classâ€� denoted the highest kind of excellence: it would include Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Newton, Archimedes, and maybe a dozen others. Well, said Hardy, there had only been two additions in his lifetime. One was Lenin and the other Einstein.”
― C.P. Snow, Variety of Men

“The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begun transmuting elements, the physics laboratory at Oxford had not been wired for electricity. Intellectual neglect technical education to this day.

[Describing C.P. Snow's observations on the neglect of technical education.]”
― Richard Rhodes, Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate About Machines Systems and the Human World

“The Bloomsbury Group has been characterised as a liberal, pacifist, and at times libertine, intellectual enclave of Cambridge-based privilege. The Cambridge men of the group (Bell, Forster, Fry, Keynes, Strachey, Sydney-Turner) were members of the elite and secret society of Cambridge Apostles. °Â´Ç´Ç±ô´Ú’s aesthetic understanding, and broader philosophy, were in part shaped by, and at first primarily interpreted in terms of, (male) Bloomsbury’s dominant aesthetic and philosophical preoccupations, rooted in the work of G. E. Moore (a central influence on the Apostles), and culminating in Fry’s and Clive Bell’s differing brands of pioneering aesthetic formalism. ‘The main things which Moore instilled deep into our minds and characters,â€� Leonard Woolf recalls, ‘were his peculiar passion for truth, for clarity and common sense, and a passionate belief in certain values.â€�
Increasing awareness of °Â´Ç´Ç±ô´Ú’s feminism, however, and of the influence on her work of other women artists, writers and thinkers has meant that these Moorean and male points of reference, though of importance, are no longer considered adequate in approaching °Â´Ç´Ç±ô´Ú’s work, and her intellectual development under the tutelage of women, together with her involvement with feminist thinkers and activists, is also now acknowledged.”
― Jane Goldman, The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf

“Babbage â€� gave the name to the [Cambridge] Analytical Society, which he stated was formed to advocate 'the principles of pure d-ism as opposed to the dot-age of the university.”
― W.W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics

“Truth like beauty seems to be in the eye and mind of the beholder”
― Helene Munson

“Cambridge is beautiful... but... it doesn't have the power to heal and uplift as these forests and hills do. Buildings don't soothe you in the way that natural scenery does.”
― Siobhán Carew, Cambridge Red

“Two places away to the left was the don who had been Richard’s Director of Studies in English, who showed no signs of recognising him at all. This was hardly surprising since Richard had spent his three years here assiduously avoiding him, often to the extent of growing a beard and pretending to be someone else.”
― Douglas Adams

“To put it in somewhat drastic terms, Cambridge in the thirties was characterised by two things: a craze for communism and a craze for homosexuality.
“Rubbish!� Farley said.
“Well, you’re bound to have been busy with other things as well, like drunkenness, geometry and Shakespeare.”
― David Lagercrantz, Fall of Man in Wilmslow

“She flirted and procrastinated,
toyed superficially with love,
but in her heart awaited more.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Poems

“Two words, a superficial joke,
the splendour of those sombre eyes.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Poems

“my soul’s ready
to relish everything beneath the moon,
the ancient and the new.
But I am in disaccord with the moon’s glow,
I try to avoid melancholy �
Oh keep me, Lord, from being a poet,
the earthly foolishly to miss!”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Collected Poems

“Thomas didn't usually mind Thursdays but this had been the sort of day that would eat the last biscuit in the tin and put the lid back on.”
― V.R. Ling, King Street Run

“The study smelled of brandy, saddle leather, and the bay rum her father's valet used after he shaved him. She glanced at the rows of books and imagined herself in Anthony's place being tutored for Cambridge. Her father always said she was far too intelligent for a girl, but he'd never stopped her from reading any of the books she requested, even the slightly scandalous ones.”
― Catherine Lloyd, Death Comes to the Village

“Papa decided that dear Isabelle was getting less â€� or it may have been more â€� out of her Cambridge education than he had expected.”
― P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

“Why not stay in Cambridge for a week or so and let me show you the city? Sophie would let you have her spare room.â€�
‘No thank you, Hugo. I have to get back to town.�
There was nothing in town for her, but with Hugo there would be nothing in Cambridge for her either.”
― P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

“Disconnect them from reason, and ultimately from deeper contact.”
― Kevin Klehr, Virtual Insanity