“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
Ian Caldwell
Born place: The United States
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“Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.”
― Oscar Wilde, quote from An Ideal Husband
“Is power like the vis viva and the quantite d’avancement? That is, is it conserved by the universe, or is it like shares of a stock, which may have great value one day, and be worthless the next? If power is like stock shares, then it follows that the immense sum thereof lately lost by B[olingbroke] has vanished like shadows in sunlight. For no matter how much wealth is lost in stock crashes, it never seems to turn up, but if power is conserved, then B’s must have gone somewhere. Where is it? Some say ‘twas scooped up by my Lord R, who hid it under a rock, lest my Lord M come from across the sea and snatch it away. My friends among the Whigs say that any power lost by a Tory is infallibly and insensibly distributed among all the people, but no matter how assiduously I search the lower rooms of the clink for B’s lost power, I cannot seem to find any there, which explodes that argument, for there are assuredly very many people in those dark salons. I propose a novel theory of power, which is inspired by . . . the engine for raising water by fire. As a mill makes flour, a loom makes cloth and a forge makes steel, so we are assured this engine shall make power. If the backers of this device speak truly, and I have no reason to deprecate their honesty, it proves that power is not a conserved quantity, for of such quantities, it is never possible to make more. The amount of power in the world, it follows, is ever increasing, and the rate of increase grows ever faster as more of these engines are built. A man who hordes power is therefore like a miser who sits on a heap of coins in a realm where the currency is being continually debased by the production of more coins than the market can bear. So that what was a great fortune, when first he raked it together, insensibly becomes a slag heap, and is found to be devoid of value. When at last he takes it to the marketplace to be spent. Thus my Lord B and his vaunted power hoard what is true of him is likely to be true of his lackeys, particularly his most base and slavish followers such as Mr. Charles White. This varmint has asserted that he owns me. He fancies that to own a man is to have power, yet he has got nothing by claiming to own me, while I who was supposed to be rendered powerless, am now writing for a Grub Street newspaper that is being perused by you, esteemed reader.”
― Neal Stephenson, quote from The System of the World
“Love isn't something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism. It isn't a feeling, it is a practice.”
― Erich Fromm, quote from The Art of Loving
“I stare at the way the tracks of her tears break across her jaw and along her neck, at how it looks like her face, once shattered, has been carefully put back together. And I wonder if that’s what my scars really are: proof that I’ve put myself back together again.”
― Carrie Ryan, quote from The Dark and Hollow Places
“They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.”
― Donald Miller, quote from Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
The Design of Everyd...
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Parade's EndBookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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