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Residuals Squared QUOTES

Residuals Squared QUOTES

1 " She was always on guard against false claims that religious faith was psychologically unhealthy. She was religious, her family and friends were religious, and they were okay. They were more than okay. They were confident, compassionate, productive people--all this while realizing that when they wanted to walk across a room, they didn't place one foot in front of the other unless God animated them to do so. "

― Gwen Chavarria , Residuals Squared

2 " As he learned more math, Brodt made the wonder-inspiring observation that mathematical laws seemed to be Someone's intention rather than just accidents in many concepts: infinity, unity being totality, irrational numbers in general and pi in particular as it illustrates such disparate occurrences as the relationship of height to base perimeter in the Great Pyramid of Giza and the course of any meandering river (over a surface smoothed for consistency). There was also the Fibonacci Sequence, that looping string of addends which, with their sums, describes the spirals on a nautilus shell, the distribution of leaves around a tree branch, and the genealogy of ants and bees. It all seemed too orderly, too regular and consistent to have occurred by chance. So many things in the world appeared as blotches, smears, or random spikes that these mathematically explained phenomena were extraordinary--he wanted to say mystical, but he wouldn't want to be caught using that word. "

― Gwen Chavarria , Residuals Squared

3 " Shannon thought about all the childhood diseases that had been eradicated, but what good did it do? A child's life could still be wiped away in an instant. Why did modern people presume that they would die only in old age? Previous generations hadn't made such a presumption. She also thought about the opportunities of motherhood that were now lost to her. She wished she had said and done more to confirm Marzieh's positive sense of self. She wondered if Marzieh understood how much her mother loved her.
On the fifth day things began to improve. Hope was a tiny red fish wiggling through a wide, black, slow-moving river under a dark sky. Shannon leaned over the bow of an old, splintered rowboat adrift in the water in order to greet it. "

― Gwen Chavarria , Residuals Squared

4 " Sanayah returned to work after a week. She said she had to come back for her clients. 'Ali didn't like it, but that was her choice. She decided that even if Ami were not supportive, the aggressive client was a rarity, a remote risk.

Ten-meter hills of brownest humus and blackest ash stood between Sanayah and her return to work. The slopes were at their critical angle of repose so she was afraid to step on them; they might cascade down on her. "

― Gwen Chavarria , Residuals Squared

5 " Nothing sprang up at him in his youth that declared the presence of God, but when he studied mathematics in high school and college, one principle arrested his attention: central tendency, the great force drawing natural phenomena toward moderation and away from extremes. Some birch trees are tall at maturity and some are short, but most are a middle height. A cat can give birth to any number of kittens from one to eight in a typical litter, but more kittens are born to litters of four than any other litter size. The differences fall quite smoothly along a bell curve. Scientific consensus was that all genetic traits, except of course those that had been intentionally altered, including human height, weight, intelligence, etc. were so distributed. It was like nature did what Brodt had one day in the breakroom heard Sanayah call "choosing the middle path." Was central tendency a law of nature or a law of God, or were they the same thing? "

― Gwen Chavarria , Residuals Squared