Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

I often have said that to be a college president, you need a thick skin, a good sense of humor, and nerves like sewer pipes.

At home, when the heating pipes made noises, I imagined a tiny person was in there skipping with a rope. The fantasy world of tiny things became my escape.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.

We can move water easily with plastic pipes. We can move shade around with nursery cloth like a tinker toy for animals and plants. Yet we have developed this necessity to grow food with chemical fertiliser because we have forgotten the magic of manure.

I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.

The poor things keep calling in those ? those pumbles, I think they're called ? you know, the ones who mend pipes and things ?

Grover wore his fake feet and his pants to pass as human. He wore a green rasta-style cap, because when it rained his curly hair flattened and you could just see the tips of his horns. His bright orange backpack was full of scrap metal and apples to snack on. In his pocket was a set of reed pipes his daddy goat had carved for him, even though he only knew two songs: Mozart's Piano Concerto no. 12 and Hilary Duff's "So Yesterday," both of which sounded pretty bad on reed pipes.

Women thrive on novelty and are easy meat for the commerce of fashion. Men prefer old pipes and torn jackets.

I often have said that to be a college president you need a thick skin a good sense of humor and nerves like sewer pipes.

The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.