Esther, having thus fulfilled her obligations to her friends, forgot them both instantly, and returned her attention to a volume called [...] and a German monograph on Sodoma; works which she was reading and annotating by her own interleaved system, a system which had evolved from her own inability to concentrate fully on any one topic for more than ten minutes. It had thrown up some very challenging cross-references in its time, and she was at the moment pursuing lichenology as a method of dating the antiquity of landscape: a gratifyingly pointless and therefore pure pursuit which enabled her mind to wander in the direction of Italy... and read on, waiting for some little current to leap from one page or the other, from one lobe of the brain to the other, and to ignite a new twig of meaning, to fill a small new cell in her storehouse of erudition. She was content with twigs and cells, or so it seemed. Sometimes, when accused of eccentricity or indeed perversity of vision, she would claim that all knowledge must always be omnipresent in all things, and that one could startle oneself into seeing the whole by tweaking unexpectedly at the surprised corner of the great mantle...

Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way, 86-87

Via Hugh Blackmer’s quotations page, which also contains such gems as:

The data, unfortunately, did not share our enthusiasm for the hypothesized pattern.

Leik and Matthews 196

After poking around Blackmer’s vast website a bit, I’ve decided that I hope I grow up to have an academic mind somewhat like his.