Life
His father was originally from South Africa, and his mother was English; he has two younger brothers. After a childhood in poverty, he studied languages and taught himself Gregg Shorthand. Having learned Welsh, he was interviewed in Welsh on radio; he has a reasonable knowledge of ten different languages. He was apparently approached by the Home Office to work on speaker identification but turned down the offer as it was still considered unacceptable to be homosexual at the time, and he feared that the security check would make his homosexuality public.
Read more about this topic: John C. Wells
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Life isn’t meant to be easy. It’s hard to take being on the top—or on the bottom. I guess I’m something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things.... Life is one crisis after another.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough.... He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)