"Apparently, seagulls know about Kelvin-Helmholtz instability."

"I mean, this is kind of stupid, but...."

"We've sort of done a thought experiment, but I did it for real." [pause] "I'm going somewhere with this...."

Officemate's advisor: "Were both of you asleep?!"
Officemate: [drowsily] "We're preparing for class...."

"I'm sort of winging this class."

"No, this isn't in your notes. I'm just kind of making it up."

"You can't go up and convince the CO molecules to change frequency."

"And the IF amplifier says, 'What the [heck] are you?!'"

"It's like nursery school--lots of little kids running around in the conductor."

"[Cooper pairs are] like a loose marriage between electrons. But they don't know who's married to who. It's like a big orgy in the superconductor."

It turns out that prickly pear cactus needles are about the same size as the SIS junction. So we send our collaborators all over the world prickly pear cactus needles for manipulating this guy.

[notes] Backend Spectrometer: Makes a great space heater!

"Intensity is 'I' per everything else. If you ever get stuck on a prelim, just keep writing stuff and that's intensity."

"So what was your question again? I got distracted by myself."

"It's a toss-up as to whether the copier or the projector is worse."

[about emission lines] "These things are pretty pointy."

"If you stuck your odor-eater in your toaster, it would smell really bad, even before it caught fire."

[after someone asked what the difference was between a small brown dwarf and a large planet]
"Brown dwarfs have a log(g) of 5! They don't float!!"

[colloquium right after a massive proposal was due]
"It's a pleasure to see so many catatonic faces."
"I'm rambling because I've been up for 48 hours."

“What is our current break policy? Five minutes?”
“Depends on if you have a B field.”
“Yeah, you have to be convective.”

“White dwarfs: terribly dull, terribly interesting.”

“Lecture: the process by which the notes of the lecturer are transferred to the notebooks of the students without passing through the minds of either.”

“Paper, anti-paper pairs.”

[points at a solid black box] “This is what dark matter really looks like.”