"These days when I see a child in Waitrose and smile and say, "Hello, are you going to visit your Mum in her sheltered accommodation when you grow up?" it provokes glistening eyes and hollow laughter. And if you pursue it with, "Or are you going to be a drug dealer?" it may result in a snub."
Thomas Stewart Baker is an English actor and writer. He is best known for playing the fourth incarnation of the Doctor in the BBC science fiction series Doctor Who from 1974 to 1981, making him the longest-serving actor in the role.
"But it was drama, high drama: fires at night, the fires that burned peoples houses away; bombs fell and left exotically shaped fragments in the form of shrapnel. And we collected it and traded it. As long as we were not hurt -- and I wasnt -- life seemed wonderful."
"Would you like to go to New Zealand to do a commercial?" Thats the sort of question an actor likes to hear from his agent in freezing mid -January."
"We even copied the way the Americans walked, though Father Leonard didnt like that bit of admiration. He disapproved of rolling buttocks."
"The notion that God was everywhere put paid to any possible peace of mind by the time I was six."
"The chaos of our lives suited me; I dont think I wanted it to end."
"When the doctor was there, Alfred refused to believe that hed had a stroke. "I cant have had a stroke," he grated, in a terrible rage, "Ive got 93,000 pounds in my current account."
"Ah well, towards happiness others will lead me With their tresses knotted to the horns of my brow: You know, my passion, that purple and just ripe, The pomegranates burst and murmur with bees; And our blood, aflame for her who will take it, Flows for all the eternal swarm of desire."
"In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness."
"True love is timid, as it knew its worth, And that such happiness is scarce for earth."
"People ... become so preoccupied with the means by which an end is achieved, as eventually to mistake it for the end. Just as money, which is a means of satisfying wants, comes to be regarded by a miser as the sole thing to be worked for, leaving the wants unsatisfied; so the conduct men have found preferable because most conducive to happiness, has come to be thought of as intrinsically preferable: not only to be made a proximate end (which it should be), but to be made an ultimate end, to the exclusion of the true ultimate end."
"Meanwhile the mind from pleasure less Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all thats made To a green thought in a green shade."
Andrew Marvell"Also, for more understanding, this blessed word was said: Lo, how I loved thee! Behold and see that I loved thee so much ere I died for thee that I would die for thee; and now I have died for thee and suffered willingly that which I may. And now is all my bitter pain and all my hard travail turned to endless joy and bliss to me and to thee. How should it now be that thou shouldst anything pray that pleaseth me but that I should full gladly grant it thee? For my pleasing is thy holiness and thine endless joy and bliss with me. This is the understanding, simply as I can say it, of this blessed word: Lo, how I loved thee. This shewed our good Lord for to make us glad and merry."