#oxford

I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable. ↗

— Max Beerbohm

#good-humoured #i #insufferable #made #me

My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women's education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor. ↗

— Antonia Fraser

#advantage #been #being #believed #doctor

I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature, culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford, and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction! ↗

— Philip Pullman

#basic #british #education #english #entire

For all of my life I'd been extremely healthy. I'd never had any health issues, so to go from being perfectly healthy to having this very rare disease was scary. In a lot of people it is very severe. Some people go blind, you can have neuro-lesions which affect your brain, so I was very nervous. ↗

— Sanya Richards-Ross

#going #i #indefensible #indefinable #manner

I broke down while at Oxford, was rejected by a record number of medical tribunals during the War, and finally got permission to leave Oxford and do civilian work till the War ended. ↗

— Leonard Alfred George Strong

#civilian #down #during #ended #finally

I could, I think, quite easily have gone to Oxford. I got four good A levels, but my father's income was such that I wouldn't have got a grant, and he wouldn't let me go to university, and that was the end of it. ↗

— Colin Baker

#easily #end #father #four #go

I literally fell among Quakers when I went up to Oxford. ↗

— Lionel Blue

#fell #i #literally #oxford #quakers

There was still food rationing in England and life was difficult all through my 2 year stay in Oxford. ↗

— Sydney Brenner

#england #food #life #oxford #rationing

Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These small revolutions affirm the human. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#ancient-greeks #atheism #boredom #brotherhood #cana

I wonder anybody does anything at Oxford but dream and remember, the place is so beautiful. One almost expects the people to sing instead of speaking. It is all like an opera. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#anybody #anything #beautiful #does #dream