Tom Noddy Quotes

Bubbles are always new; you just can’t find an old bubble.

The reason bubbles are spherical is that a sphere is the smallest, most economical form possible to contain a given volume.

I am not too interested in leaving the street people and joining the Establishment. I prefer street folks.

If you look at the Karamazov Brothers on TV, they’re really small and the heart is taken out of their act. That’s true for most variety acts. I’m an exception. When the camera comes in close and looks at those soap bubbles, you can really see what bubbles do.

Bubbles are incredibly basic. We think of them in that way just because they’re a kid’s toy. But I think it’s more basic than childhood, something primal – the liquid, the flow, the shapes. We were liquid at one point in our development.

I ended up living on Crete for eight months. I picked olives and did house painting and got broke.

I enjoy the beauty of the bubble, they’re fluid and yet they have these geometric shapes so they do surprising things – two spheres become a single sphere – it’s what bubbles do.

The bubbles are thinner than wavelengths of light.

I was really inspired by keeping alive these things of my childhood.

There’s never an ugly bubble.

There’s a brand, Mr. Bubble, that is sometimes called other things, like Mickey Mouse or other names. That’s the stuff I use.

Bubble cubes are central to what I do.

I receive food stamps but I have never been on welfare.

I had this memory of being with my aunt, who I loved, you know, and watching her blow some bubbles in sunlight, and my heart fluttered when I watched her.

Bubbles have more colors than a rainbow.

It’s an electrical network, isn’t it? It’s molecules in space… and they’re linked to each other electrically. Which is to say, one end of a soap molecule is attracted to a nearby water molecule electrically. The bubble is this network. The whole thing is inter-dependent.

I didn’t want to go out at night and spend my money in bars and stuff like that, so when I came home at night, I just wanted to entertain myself.

I’ve never blown an ugly bubble. Never. They’re all beautiful. They’re like jewels, transient jewels.

I’ve never had much and I’ve never needed much. If I had only two bucks in my pocket, I knew I could spend it because I could always do another show of some kind, even on a sidewalk.

I had no plans to become a responsible person.

Bubbles are just a little liquid soap and a breath of air.

There is a lot of science in bubbles. They are just like our weather system. The earth is, in effect, trapped inside a liquid sphere, the troposphere, where our weather forms. The bright colors on the outside of a bubble are just varying thicknesses of bubble, just like the varying thicknesses of clouds.

When I do the dodecahedron with the science audiences, I’ll point out that I can only do three of the five forms with bubbles, since bubbles only join at three-way corners. The two I can’t do are the ones that represent water and air. That always gets a big laugh from the mathematicians. They see the irony in it.

I’ve never been jailed for a crime of violence.

I tried to do a puppet show on the streets, and I wasn’t a very good street performer. But I found that I could stand in one place in Central Park and bounce a soap bubble on my arm, and I didn’t have to gather a crowd for the puppet show. I had a crowd.

I walked the rainbow trail for a good number of years.

If you look at the soap bubbles in the sink when you’re doing dishes, you’ll see the incredible diversity of shapes in there. There are cubes in there; there are decahedrons and tetrahedrons; there are odd, irregular shapes without names, you know.

I took a job at a factory in New Jersey to try to save money to go to Europe. When I took the job, I set a date for quitting. I was going to hitchhike around, be a hippie, see the world. I just wanted to be responsible long enough to get up the money to get there and trip around.

I had dropped out of Memphis State University after two years because I felt the real world was too exciting.

We thought we completely understood bubbles when we were kids. But we didn’t. Bubbles are these amazing things. It’s just that people aren’t paying enough attention.

I was never very good at stopping crowds. I started blowing bubbles to attract people.

Bubbles are very simplified versions of some of the basic laws of the universe.

I was in my hippie stage. It was tough for my father. First it was the long hair, then the bubbles.

The mid ’70s was the golden age. A lot of things were being born on the street then, and there was a lot of experimentation.

When I went to college, I majored in anti-war demonstrations, you know? I mean, really!