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The Rule of Four QUOTES

The Rule of Four QUOTES

1 " 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 , The Rule of Four

2 " 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 , The Rule of Four

3 " ...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 , The Rule of Four

4 " 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 , The Rule of Four

5 " 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 , The Rule of Four

6 " That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find. "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

7 " ...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing. "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

8 " Time passed, worlds diverged. "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

9 " 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 , The Rule of Four

10 " 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 , The Rule of Four

11 " The two hardest things to contemplate in life (...) are failure and age, and those are one and the same. "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

12 " 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 , The Rule of Four

13 " Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness. "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

14 " The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong. "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

15 " 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 , The Rule of Four

16 " The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see "

― Ian Caldwell , The Rule of Four

17 " 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 , The Rule of Four

18 " 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 , The Rule of Four

19 " 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 , The Rule of Four

20 " 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 , The Rule of Four