" The subcomponents were at first called different things, but eventually the physics community settled on the term 'quarks' chosen by Murray Gell-Mann for the way it sounded to him. He spotted the word in a passage from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Three quarks for Muster Mark's". As there are three quarks each in protons and neutrons (and in all particles in the category called baryons), the moniker seemed appropriate. "

― Paul Halpern , Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics