You’re the right colour for the Angel of Death, Mister Cale. But a little short.’ ‘I could cut your head off and stand on it. Then I’d be taller.
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air.
It is not against reason, said the Englishman, to prefer the destruction of the world to a scratch on your finger – how much easier to understand the same price for the gash in your soul.
…the older I get, the more I believe that if love is to be judged by most of its visible effects, it looks more like hatred than friendship.
Self-pity, while it should be accorded due respect, is the greatest of all acids to the human soul.
We are all cynics now, I suppose, and even a mewling infant knows that to save a life is to make an eternal enemy.
Feeling sorry for yourself is a universal solvent of salvation.
Hypocrites,’ replied Cale, ‘I’ve come across a lot of them recently. I mean by that I understand now how many of them there are.
– Why you?- (…) I’m the best.- Modest of you.- I am the best. Modesty has nothing to say about it.
…the heart of a child can take forty-nine blows before it’s damaged for ever and what’s done can never be undone.
Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it as it is to its victims—the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.
When he said someone had ‘died”, Erdős meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had “left”, the person had died.
Mathematician need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.
The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life.