Quotes About Backwater

I waited, uncertainly, my eyes on the Japanese chest. It was a beauty, a prize for a retired sea-captain's home in backwater Boston: scrimshaw and cowrie shells, Old Testament samplers cross-stitched by unmarried sisters, the smell of whale oil burning in the evenings, the stillness of growing old.

His lack of condemnatory zeal gave him a reputation in the religious hierarchy that ensured he would always remain a humble teacher in a backwater town.

In the Middle Ages, most people in other parts of the world who actually knew anything about northern Europe at all considered it an obscure and uninviting backwater full of religious fanatics who, aside from occasional attacks on their neighbours ('the Crusades'), were largely irrelevant to global trade and world politics

The Empire is falling. The barbarians are at the gate. Even the mightiest civilizations can vanish. When its empire fell, Rome turned into a pathetic backwater, full of ruins, with sheep wandering through it, munching on the overgrown grass. All the glory was gone. Will the same fate befall Los Angeles and Manhattan? Will they be overrun by wild dogs, munching on the bones of dead Influencers and bankers? One can hope!

As a child marooned in a post-war South London backwater with no ready cash and a bafflingly dysfunctional family, I had to glean my amusement wherever I could.

When I started in the field, aging research was the backwater of biology. The idea that you could find a molecule that would prevent many diseases at once was considered impossible.

Even in the business department of a magazine, tech was a backwater.

A Simple Story is one of those books which, for some reason or other, have failed to come down to us, as they deserved, along the current of time, but have drifted into a literary backwater where only the professional critic or the curious discoverer can find them out.

And on that walk he said to me, John, you might as well know now what you're sure to learn sometime. This is a backwater - you must be aware of that already. Leaving here is like waking from a trance.

Really, although it's a great place to live, Ottawa's a rather backwater capital of a very decentralized state where power over important issues like education, health care and social services lies with the provinces.

Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don't look so surprised. I'm not saying anything you don't know. Since World War II, all the really important discoveries have come out of private laboratories.

You want a university appointment?" "Yes." "That's a mistake," Hammond said briskly. "At least, if you respect your talent." Wu had blinked. "Why?" "Because, let's face facts," Hammond said. "Universities are no longer the intellectual centers of the country. The very idea is preposterous. Universities are the backwater. Don't look so surprised.

After Volcker's speech, bonds became objects of speculation, a means of creating wealth rather than merely storing it. Overnight the bond market was transformed from a backwater into a casino.

Afghanistan was always a backwater in the Islamic world.

Yet, the invasion was not one prong of a grand campaign on the part of the caliphate to conquer "Europe," which was at that time a poor and underdeveloped backwater and did not figure at all in the Arabo-Islamic imagination.

But she wasn't a serving girl in a Phorliss cantina this time, or a come-up flector for a swoop gang on Caprioril, or even a hyperdrive mechanic stuck in the backwater of the Ison Corridor. She was second in command to the most powerful smuggler in the galaxy, with the kind of resources and mobility she hadn't had since the death of the Emperor. [p] The kind of resources that would let her find Luke Skywalker again. And kill him

A hick town is one in which there is no place to go where you shouldn't be.

A red dragonfly hovers above a backwater of the stream, its wings moving so fast that the eye sees not wings in movement but a probability distribution of where the wings might be

By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn't actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built, epoxy-glued version of the world.

Campbell could not disagree with Europeans' condescending view of American science as a backwater rich in money and manpower but poor in theoretical understanding.