Quotes from The Rule of Four

“Hope,... which whispered from Pandora's box after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion... It's a law of motion, a fact of physics..., no different from the stages of white dwarves and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I'd never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask--but a great friend does it without being asked at all.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yard-stick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Hope...which is whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Inde fernut, titidem qui vivere debeat annos, corpre de patrio parvum phenica renasci' It's from Ovid. It means, 'A little phoenix is born anew from the father's body, fated to live the same number of years.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Never mix books and bed. In the spectrum of excitement, sex & thought were on opposite ends. Both to be enjoyed, but never at the same time.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“A son is a promise that time makes to a man,the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“The two hardest things to contemplate in life (...) are failure and age, and those are one and the same.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“His intelligence was relentless and wild, a fire even he couldn't control. It swallowed entire books at a sitting, finding flaws in arguments, gaps in evidence, errors in interpretation, in objects, far from his own.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Even as I begin to realize the magnitude of what I’m doing, a thought occurs to me. Somewhere in the city of rebirth, Paul is lifting himself out of bed, staring out his window, and waiting. There are pigeons cooing on rooftops, cathedral bells tolling from towers in the distance. We are sitting here, continents apart, the same way we always did: at the edges of our mattresses, together. On the ceilings where I am going there will be saints and gods and flights of angels. Everywhere I walk there will be reminders of all that time can’t touch. My heart is a bird in a cage, ruffling its wings with the ache of expectation.
In Italy, the sun is rising.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“The magic of Paul’s intelligence is that he has more patience than anyone I’ve ever met, and with it he simply wears problems down. To count a hundred million stars, he told me once, at the rate of one per second, sounds like a job that no one could possibly complete in a lifetime. In reality, it would only take three years. The key is focus, a willingness not to be distracted. And that is Paul’s gift: an intuition of just how much a person can do slowly.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“A son is the promise that time makes to a man, the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that the person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Because every desire has its proper object. It means people spend their lives wanting things they shouldn’t. The world confuses into taking their love and aiming it where it doesn’t belong.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“Há uma velha regra que minhas irmãs me ensinaram. Sempre que você se encontrar com uma garota, faça-o em algum lugar bem conhecido. Os restaurantes franceses não impressionam se você não conseguir ler o menu, e filmes intelectuais são um tiro pela culatra se você não compreende a trama.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“O jeito de um garoto argumentar é encontrar uma posição defensiva e mantê-la, mesmo quando ela não é sincera.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“É melhor amar alguma coisa que possa amá-lo também.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

“What a strange thing, to build a castle in the air. We made a friendship out of nothing, because nothing was the heart of what we shared.”
― Ian Caldwell, quote from The Rule of Four

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“The first sound was the bowstrings, the snap of five thousand hemp cords being tightened by stressed yew, and that sound was like the devil’s harpstrings being plucked. Then there was the arrow sound, the sigh of air over feathers, but multiplied, so that it was like the rushing of a wind. That sound diminished as two clouds of arrows, thick as any flock of starlings, climbed into the gray sky. Hook, reaching for another broadhead, marveled at the sight of five thousand arrows in two sky-shadowing groups. The two storms seemed to hover for a heart’s beat at the height of their trajectory, and then the missiles fell. It was Saint Crispin’s Day in Picardy. For an instant there was silence. Then the arrows struck. It was the sound of steel on steel. A clatter, like Satan’s hailstorm.”
― Bernard Cornwell, quote from Azincourt

“Well," said Eilonwy, "you can't blame Rhun for being born. I mean, you could, but that wouldn't help matters. It's like kicking a rock with your bare foot.”
― Lloyd Alexander, quote from The Castle of Llyr

“Wherefore it would appear that this number was thus allied unto her for the purpose of signifying that, at her birth, all these nine heavens were at perfect unity with each other as to their influence. This is one reason that may be brought: but more narrowly considering, and according to the infallible truth, this number was her own self: that is to say, by similitude. As thus. The number three is the root of the number nine; seeing that without the interposition of any other number, being multiplied merely by itself, it produceth nine, as we manifestly perceive that three times three are nine. Thus, three being of itself the efficient of nine, and the Great Efficient of Miracles being of Himself Three Persons (to wit: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit), which, being Three, are also One:—this lady was accompanied by the number nine to the end that men might clearly perceive her to be a nine, that is, a miracle, whose only root is the Holy Trinity. It may be that a more subtile person would find for this thing a reason of greater subtilty: but such is the reason that I find, and that liketh me best.”
― Dante Alighieri, quote from Vita Nuova

“It is a naked city. Faith is not pampered, nor hope encouraged; there is no place to lay one's exhaustion: but instead pinnacles skewer it undisguised against vacancy.”
― William Gaddis, quote from The Recognitions

“Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer were a very notorious couple of cats.
As knockabout clowns, quick-change comedians,
Tight-rope walkers and acrobats
They had an extensive reputation.
[...]
When the family assembled for Sunday dinner,
With their minds made up that they wouldn’t get thinner
On Argentine joint, potatoes and greens,
And the cook would appear from behind the scenes
And say in a voice that was broken with sorrow
"I'm afraid you must wait and have dinner tomorrow!
For the joint has gone from the oven like that!"
Then the family would say: "It's that horrible cat!
It was Mungojerrie – or Rumpleteazer!" -
And most of the time they left it at that.

Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer had a wonderful way of working together.
And some of the time you would say it was luck
And some of the time you would say it was weather.
They would go through the house like a hurricane,
And no sober person could take his oath
Was it Mungojerrie – or Rumpleteazer?
Or could you have sworn that it mightn't be both?

And when you heard a dining room smash
Or up from the pantry there came a loud crash
Or down from the library came a loud ping
From a vase which was commonly said to be Ming
Then the family would say: "Now which was which cat?
It was Mungojerrie! And Rumpleteazer!"
And there's nothing at all to be done about that!”
― T.S. Eliot, quote from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

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