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21 " The tradeoff between what you pay and what you receive may hardly make sound calculations in life situations), but survival has a cost. "
― Girdhar Joshi , Some Mistakes Have No Pardon
22 " We should do this on computer," she said, chalking it carefully for the eighty-ninth time. " With a drawing pad." " Nonsense. You're lucky I don't make you inscribe it with a stylus on a wax tablet, like the old days," Myrnin snorted. " Children. Spoiled children, always playing with the shinest toy." " Computers are more efficient!" " I can perform calculations on that abacus faster than you can solve them on your computer," Myrnin sneered.Okay, now he was pissing her off. " Prove it!" " What?" " Prove it." She backed off on her tone, but Myrnin wasn't looking angry; he was looking strangely interested. He stared at her for a second in silence, and then he got the biggest, oddest smile she'd ever seen on the face of a vampire." All right," he said. " A contest. Computer versus abacus." She wasn't at all sure now that was a good idea, even if it had been her idea, essentially. " Um -- what do I win?" More importantly, what do I lose? Making bargains was a way of life in Morganville, and it was a lot like making deals with man-eating fairies. Better be careful what you ask for." Your freedom," he said solemnly. His eyes were wide and guileless, his too-young face shining with honesty. " I will tell Amelie you were not suited to the work. She'll let you go about your life, such as it is." Good prize. Too good. Claire swallowed hard. " And if I lose?" " Then I eat you," Myrnin said. "
23 " I was impressed by the scene in Apollo 13 where the astronauts request confirmation of their calculations and several people at Mission Control dive for their slide rules. For several months after that, my standard response to statements like " We must implement multi-processor object-oriented Java-based client-server technologies immediately!" was " You know, FORTRAN and slide rules put men on the moon and got them back safely multiple times." Tended to shut them up, at least for a moment. "
24 " The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became—like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense. "
― Richard Ford , Canada
25 " What was the power that induced strong soldiers to put off their jackets and shirts, and present their hands to be tied up, and tortured for hours, it might be, under the scourge, with an air of ready volition? The moral coercion of despair; the result of an unconscious calculation of chances that satisfies them that it is ultimately better to do all that, bad as it is, than try the alternative. These unconscious calculations are going on every day with each of us, and the results embody themselves in our lives; and no one knows that there has been a process and a balance struck, and that what they see, and very likely blame, is by the fiat of an invisible but quite irresistible power. "
― J. Sheridan Le Fanu , The Haunted Baronet and Others: Ghost Stories 1861-70
26 " We should not conclude from this that everything depends on waves of irrational psychology. On the contrary, the state of long-term expectation is often steady, and, even when it is not, the other factors exert their compensating effects. We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectation, since the basis for making such calculations does not exist; and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance. "
― John Maynard Keynes , The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
27 " He rose and stood tottering in that cold dark with his arms held out for balance while the vestibular calculations in his skull cranked out their reckonings. An old chronicle. To seek out the upright. No fall but preceded by a declination... Upright to what? Something nameless in the night, lode or matrix. To which he and the stars were common satellite. Like the great pendulum in its rotunda scribing through the long day movements of the universe of which you may say it knows nothing and yet know it must. "
― Cormac McCarthy , The Road
28 " The greatest gift of life on the mountain is time. Time to think or not think, read or not read, scribble or not scribble -- to sleep and cook and walk in the woods, to sit and stare at the shapes of the hills. I produce nothing but words; I consumer nothing but food, a little propane, a little firewood. By being utterly useless in the calculations of the culture at large I become useful, at last, to myself. "
― , The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009
29 " If you want to be a big success then it becomes a dick showing contest, and that's not what it's about. It can't be about 'My book sold more copies than your book.' It can't be about 'More people went to see my movie than went to see your movie.' If it is about that, then Danielle Steel must be an extraordinarily wonderful author because she sells so many copies. You can't do calculations that way.What interests me is holding the vision: doing something that is yours and making sure that it can't be like anyone else's. "
― Clive Barker
30 " Our brains are obviously capable of astoundingly fast and complex calculations that happen subconsciously. We can't explain them because most of the time we hardly even realize they're happening. "
― Joshua Foer , Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
31 " Overwhelmed by life's complexity? Realize that our alphabet consists of only 26 letters, calculations are based on a set of 10 numbers, all variations in music are based on 7 musical notes, our DNA can be dissected into 4 letters and space on the Planck scale is probably made solely out of binary code "
― Martijn Budel
32 " Believe me, if Archimedes ever had the grand entrance of a girl as pretty as Gloria to look forward to, he would never have spent so much time calculating the value of Pi. He would have been baking her a Pie! If Euclid had ever beheld a vision of loveliness like the one I see walking into my anti-math class, he would have forgotten all the geometry of lines and planes, and concentrated on the sweet simplicity of soft curves. If Pythagoras had ever had a girl look at him the way Gloria's eyes fix in my direction, he would have given up his calculations on the hypotenuse of right triangles and run for the hills to pick a bouquet of wildflowers. "
33 " It is indispensable for us to undermine all faith, to tear out of the mind of the " goyim" the very principle of god-head and the spirit, and to put in its place arithmetical calculations and material needs "
34 " ...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart. "
― Yōko Ogawa , The Housekeeper and the Professor
35 " For we may remark generally of our mathematical researches, that these auxiliary quantities, these long and difficult calculations into which we are often drawn, are almost always proofs that we have not in the beginning considered the objects themselves so thoroughly and directly as their nature requires, since all is abridged and simplified, as soon as we place ourselves in a right point of view. "
― Louis Poinsot
36 " I have made calculations that would beggar your soul. What is it that villains always say at the end of stories? You and I are more alike than you think? Well,” the Marquess took September’s hand in hers and very gently kissed it. “We are. Oh, how alike we are! I feel very warmly towards you, and I only want to protect you, as I wish someone had protected me. Come, September, look out the window with me. It’s not a difficult thing. A show of faith, let’s call it. "
― Catherynne M. Valente , The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making (Fairyland, #1)
37 " She'd always thought that a broken heart sounded rather romantic. But in truth it was physical. Her whole chest ached, as if she'd been struck with a knife. With all her witless calculations about how to make a man desire her, she'd never realized that the most important thing was to make him like her. Or even love her. What a fool she was. "
― Eloisa James , Kiss Me, Annabel (Essex Sisters, #2)
38 " I do not remember how it got into my head to make the first calculations related to rocket. It seems to me the first seeds were planted by famous fantaseour, J. Verne. "
39 " The tall building, concentrating man in one place more densely than ever before, similarly concentrates the dilemma of our public architecture at the end of the twentieth century: whether the new forms made possible by technology are doomed by the low calculations of modern patrons and their architects. "
40 " Life it is not just a series of calculations and a sum total of statistics, it's about experience, it's about participation, it is something more complex and more interesting than what is obvious. "
