Telegraph Quotes

1. "A high upland common was this moor, two miles from end to end, and full of furze and bracken. There were no trees and not a house, nothing but a line of telegraph poles following the road, sweeping with rigidity from north to south; nailed upon one of them a small scarlet notice to stonethrowers was prominent as a wound. On so high and wide a region as Shag Moor the wind always blew, or if it did not quite blow there was a cool activity in the air. The furze was always green and growing, and, taking no account of seasons, often golden. Here in summer solitude lounged and snoozed; at other times, as now, it shivered and looked sinister. ("The Higgler")"
Author: A.E. Coppard

2. "Dim loneliness came imperceivably into the fields and he turned back. The birds piped oddly; some wind was caressing the higher foliage, turning it all one way, the way home. Telegraph poles ahead looked like half-used pencils; the small cross on the steeple glittered with a sharp and shapely permanence."
Author: A.E. Coppard

3. "No, I'm not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I'm after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company."
Author: Alan Turing

4. "You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."
Author: Albert Einstein

5. "The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect."
Author: Alison Gopnik

6. "Three or four threads may be agitated, like telegraph wires, at the same time, and if I were to tap them all I would reveal such a mixture of innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculation, fear and courage, I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four journals at once."
Author: Anaïs Nin

7. "First dentistry was painless.Then bicycles were chainless,Carriages were horseless,And many laws enforceless.Next cookery was fireless,Telegraphy was wireless,Cigars were nicotineless,And coffee caffeineless.Soon oranges were seedless,The putting green was weedless,The college boy was hatless,The proper diet fatless.New motor roads are dustless,The latest steel is rustless,Our tennis courts are sodless,Our new religion--godless."
Author: Arthur Guiterman

8. "She felt a bored indifference toward the immediate world around her, toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident, to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew that it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait, she thought, and grow up to that world."
Author: Ayn Rand

9. "She felt a board indifference toward the immediate world around her toward other children and adults alike. She took it as a regrettable accident to be borne patiently for a while, that she happened to be imprisoned among people who were dull. She had caught a glimpse of another world and she knew it existed somewhere, the world that had created trains, bridges, telegraph wires and signal lights winking in the night. She had to wait she thought, and grow up to that world. - Dagny Taggart"
Author: Ayn Rand

10. "Mr. Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval—a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old—and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawn mowers."
Author: Bill Bryson

11. "Telegraphs are machines for conveying information over extensive lines with great rapidity."
Author: Charles Babbage

12. "Just as characteristic, perhaps, is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post, telegraph, telephone, and popular press."
Author: Christian Lous Lange

13. "But even writing the column for the 'Telegraph,' that idea of working to deadlines, which as an actor that's not something you have to do in the same way. It's excited me into wanting to do a bit more."
Author: Dan Stevens

14. "To many people I have no doubt that it appears merely silly. I once found it expressed in a rather amusing way in a Russian Book called Dal Zoviet, which means the lure of far horizons. The author is Galinischev Kutuzoff [Golenischev-Kutuzov], and he tells of a man in Northern Mongolia who goes out of his yurt every morning to breathe the free air of the steppes and enjoy the immensity and the solitude. But one day he feels an uncomfortable sense of oppression, almost as if he could not breathe. He looks about to find the reason. And there, across the undulating grasslands, is a line of telegraph poles. And after the place never the same to him again."
Author: Daniele Varè

15. "I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people's mouths: vomit."
Author: Dennis Potter

16. "It's hard to land a devastating jab/cross/hook/uppercut combo to your reader's imagination when you're telegraphing your punches."
Author: Don Roff

17. "As to Bell's talking telegraph, it only creates interest in scientific circles... its commercial values will be limited."
Author: Elisha Gray

18. "Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance - the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest."
Author: Emily Greene Balch

19. "Holmes was charming and gracious, but something about him made Belknap uneasy. He could not have defined it. Indeed, for the next several decades alienists and their successors would find themselves hard-pressed to describe with any precision what it was about men like Holmes that could cause them to seem warm and ingratiating but also telegraph the vague sense that some important element of humanness was missing."
Author: Erik Larson

20. "The audacious telegraph operator took the flower from his buttonhole and said to her: "I give you my life in this rose."
Author: Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

21. "Communications devices were always used to effect change, to effect revolution. Telephone, telegraph - these all seemed like very big enhancements at the time."
Author: Gary Shteyngart

22. "Eighteen fifty-eight was a year of great technological advancement in the West. That was the year when Queen Victoria was able, for the first time, to communicate with President Buchanan, through the Transatlantic Telegraphic Cable. And they were the first to 'Twitter' transatlantically."
Author: Hans Rosling

23. "Anything can become a musical sound. The wind on telegraph wires is a great sound; get it into your machine and play it and it becomes interesting."
Author: Hans Zimmer

24. "We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

25. "Where, indeed? Captain Vincent Reed had been born in the city of Richmond, Virginia, of northern parents who were stationed there by the telegraph company. He had attended West Point and he thought he knew something about warfare, having served under General Pope in his long and futile struggle against General Stonewall Jackson. Those men were fighters who would face the enemy till the last bullet was fired, but neither would participate in such a slaughter. Reed had had his troops in position. He was quite prepared to rush in for the kill, and he had positioned himself so that he would be in the vanguard when his men made their charge against the guns of the young braves threatening the left flank. But when he saw that the enemy had no weapons, that even their bows and arrows were not at hand, and that he was supposed to chop down little girls and old women, he rebelled on the spot, taking counsel with no one but his own conscience."
Author: James A. Michener

26. "In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text."
Author: James Gleick

27. "For the most part, Ranger had a consistent personality.He wasn't a guy who wasted a lot of unnecessary energy and effort. He moved and he spoke with an efficient ease that was more animal than human. And he didn't telegraph his emotions. Unless Ranger had his tongue in my mouth it was usually impossible to tell what he was thinking. But every now and then, Ranger would step out of the box, and like a little treat that was doled out on special occasions, Ranger would make an entirely outrageous sexual statement.At least it would be outrageous coming from an ordinary guy... from Ranger it seemed on the mark."
Author: Janet Evanovich

28. "The lieutenant's fooling around again with the telegraph girl at the station," said the corporal, after he had gone. "He's been running after her for a fortnight and he's always frightfully furious when he comes from the telegraph office and he says about her: "She's a whore. She won't sleep with me!"
Author: Jaroslav Hašek

29. "Then I dropped my forehead against his and sat there for a long time, as if I could telegraph a message through our two skulls, from my brain to his. I wanted to make him understand some things.You know all that stuff we've always said about you?" I whispered. "What a total pain you are? Don't believe it. Don't believe it for a minute, Marley." He needed to know that, and something more, too. There was something I had never told him, that no one ever had. I wanted him to hear it before he went.Marley," I said. "You are a great dog."
Author: John Grogan

30. "To escape jury duty in England, wear a bowler hat and carry a copy of the Daily telegraph."
Author: John Mortimer

31. "These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves -- they're good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on 'em."
Author: Laura Ingalls Wilder

32. "Her mother would be appalled, but she wouldn't say anything. She would just telegraph her distress with tightened lips and raised brows. She was good at that. Clemmie's mother's brows were better than sign language, complicated concepts conveyed with the minimum of movement."
Author: Lauren Willig

33. "Speaking of Vaughan, his claim in the Daily Telegraph last week that the story of a senior county pro being offered money to fix domestic matches was 'the tip of the iceberg' did not go down well with one former England captain contacted by the Top Spin. 'I played the game for almost 20 years,' he seethed, 'and I don't know a single player who has been offered money, either for information or to fix a game. To say it's the tip of the iceberg is absolute rubbish.'The fact that the player in question had just registered a mediocre Stableford score of 20 playing off a handicap of 14 had nothing to do, I was assured, with his foul mood."
Author: Lawrence Booth

34. "What would the new teacher, representing France, teach us? Railroading? No. France knows nothing valuable about railroading. Steamshipping? No. France has no superiorities over us in that matter. Steamboating? No. French steamboating is still of Fulton's date--1809. Postal service? No. France is a back number there. Telegraphy? No, we taught her that ourselves. Journalism? No. Magazining? No, that is our own specialty. Government? No; Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Nobility, Democracy, Adultery the system is too variegated for our climate. Religion? No, not variegated enough for our climate. Morals? No, we cannot rob the poor to enrich ourselves."
Author: Mark Twain

35. "The heyday of spiritualism--with its seances and spirit communications zinging through the ether--coincided with the dawn of the electric age. The generation that so readily embraced spiritualism was the same generation that had been asked to accept such seeming witchery as electricity, telegraphy, radio waves, and telephonic communications--disembodied voices mysteriously travelling through space and emerging from a "receiver" hundreds of miles distant"
Author: Mary Roach

36. "I was thankful that nobody was there to meet me at the airport. We reached Paris just as the light was fading. It had been a soft, gray March day, with the smell of spring in the air. The wet tarmac glistened underfoot; over the airfield the sky looked very high, rinsed by the afternoon's rain to a pale clear blue. Little trails of soft cloud drifted in the wet wind, and a late sunbeam touched them with a fleeting underglow. Away beyond the airport buildings the telegraph wires swooped gleaming above the road where passing vehicles showed lights already."
Author: Mary Stewart

37. "If you walk five blocks north from the wholefoods in Berkeley along Telegraph Avenue and then turn right at Dwight way, you'll soon come to a trash-strewn patch of grass and trees dotted with the tattered camps of a few homeless people."
Author: Michael Pollan

38. "The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form."
Author: Neil Postman

39. "We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography."
Author: Neil Postman

40. "In saying no one knew about the ideas implicit in the telegraph, I am not quite accurate. Thoreau knew. Or so one may surmise. It is alleged that upon being told that through the telegraph a man in Maine could instantly send a message to a man in Texas, Thoreau asked, "But what do they have to say to each other?" In asking this question, to which no serious interest was paid, Thoreau was directing attention to the psychological and social meaning of the telegraph, and in particular to its capacity to change the character of information -- from the personal and regional to the impersonal and global."
Author: Neil Postman

41. "A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)"
Author: Neil Postman

42. "The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them."
Author: Neil Postman

43. "The great trains howling from track to track all night. The taut and telegraphic murmur of ten thousand city wires, drawn most cruelly against a city sky. The rush of city waters, beneath the city streets. The passionate passing of the night's last El."
Author: Nelson Algren

44. "In that memorable year, 1822: Oersted, a Danish physicist, held in his hands a piece of copper wire, joined by its extremities to the two poles of a Volta pile. On his table was a magnetized needle on its pivot, and he suddenly saw (by chance you will say, but chance only favours the mind which is prepared) the needle move and take up a position quite different from the one assigned to it by terrestrial magnetism. A wire carrying an electric current deviates a magnetized needle from its position. That, gentlemen, was the birth of the modern telegraph."
Author: Oersted

45. "Oersted would never have made his great discovery of the action of galvanic currents on magnets had he stopped in his researches to consider in what manner they could possibly be turned to practical account; and so we would not now be able to boast of the wonders done by the electric telegraphs. Indeed, no great law in Natural Philosophy has ever been discovered for its practical implications, but the instances are innumerable of investigations apparently quite useless in this narrow sense of the word which have led to the most valuable results."
Author: Oersted

46. "The following obituary appeared in the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph of Sept. 16, 1958:A GREAT POET died last week in Lancieux, France, at the age of 84.He was not a poet's poet. Fancy-Dan dilletantes will dispute the description "great."He was a people's poet. To the people he was great. They understood him, and knew that any verse carrying the by-line of Robert W. Service would be a lilting thing, clear, clean and power-packed, beating out a story with a dramatic intensity that made the nerves tingle.And he was no poor, garret-type poet, either. His stuff made money hand over fist. One piece alone, The Shooting of Dan McGrew, rolled up half a million dollars for him. He lived it up well and also gave a great deal to help others."The only society I like," he once said, "is that which is rough and tough - and the tougher the better. That's where you get down to bedrock and meet human people."He found that kind of society in the Yukon gold rush, and he immortalized it."
Author: Robert W. Service

47. "Writers didn't usually draw a crowd of paparazzi. As the service progressed, however, journalists began to enter the church. When it was over, they pushed their way toward him. Gillon, Marianne, and Martin tried to run interference. One persistent gray fellow (gray suit, gray hair, gray face, gray voice) got through the crowd, shoved a tape recorder toward him, and asked the obvious questions. "I'm sorry," he replied. "I'm here for my friend's memorial service. It's not appropriate to do interviews.""You don't understand," the gray fellow said, sounding puzzled. "I'm from the Daily Telegraph. They've sent me down specially.""Gillon, I need your help," he said.Gillon leaned down toward the reporter from his immense height and said, firmly, and in his grandest accent, "Fuck off.""You can't talk to me like that," the man from the Telegraph said. "I've been to public school."
Author: Salman Rushdie

48. "We cut three telegraph wires, and fastened the free ends to the saddles of six riding-camels of the Howeitat. The astonished team struggled far into the eastern valleys with the growing weight of twanging, tangling wire and the bursting poles dragging after them. At last they could no longer move. So we cut them loose and rode laughing after the caravan."
Author: T.E. Lawrence

49. "I recall one particular sunset. It lent an ember to my bicycle hell. Overhead, above the black music of telegraph wires, a number of long, dark-violet clouds lined with flamingo pink hung motionless in a fan-shaped arrangement; the whole thing was like some prodigious ovation in terms of color and form! It was dying, however, and everything else was darkening, too; but just above the horizon, in a lucid, turquoise space, beneath a black stratus, the eye found a vista that only a fool could mistake for the square parts of this or any other sunset. It occupied a very small sector of the enormous sky and had the peculiar neatness of something seen through the wrong end of a telescope. There it lay in wait, a brilliant convolutions, anachronistic in their creaminess and extremely remote; remote but perfect in every detail; fantastically reduced but faultlessly shaped; my marvelous tomorrow ready to be delivered to me."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

50. "Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper."
Author: William Kennedy

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