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41 " muttering reminders to himself. Simon never forgot a thing. He knew pi to more decimal places than any sane person would want to. I sometimes joked that it was an irrational feat of memory. A maths joke. Nobody ever got it. "
― Mark Lawrence , One Word Kill (Impossible Times #1)
42 " Laughter should be unguarded even if nothing else is. "
43 " I felt like an old tree in one of those late autumn gales. The chemo’s job was to strip my leaves and keep them gone. My job was not to get uprooted while the gale blew. "
44 " Of all the worlds, in all the universes, he walks into mine. "
45 " It doesn’t seem right, having to pay for the privilege of committing a crime. "
46 " The equations that govern the universe don’t care about “now”. You can ask them questions about this time or that time, but nowhere in the elegance of their mathematics is there any such thing as “now”. The idea of one specific moment, one universal “now” racing along at sixty minutes an hour, slicing through the seconds, spitting the past out behind it and throwing itself into the future . . . that’s just an artefact of consciousness, something entirely of our own making that the cosmos has no use for. "
47 " You didn’t have to spend long in Rust’s company to realise that he had no threshold. He would escalate any situation with startling rapidity to the point where he could count it as a victory, which meant the other party had to lose. His wasn’t a personality built to last. "
48 " They had us arranged by length in treatment so the ward looked rather like an assembly line, taking in healthy children at one end and spitting out corpses at the other. "
49 " It doesn’t matter what the doctors say, there’s no fatal disease that doesn’t feel contagious to the person sitting next to you. "
50 " And I realised that just as the disease was starting to take me away from the world, I was for the first time, in a short and self-absorbed kind of life, starting to really see it for what it was. The beauty and the silliness, and how one piece fitted with the next, and how we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it. "
51 " The equations that govern the universe don’t care about time. There’s no “now”, no past or present, just a solution to the equation. That’s how rocks see it. How atoms see it; planets, stars; antimatter, dark matter. None of it cares about “now”. Time is just a variable. We make now. Consciousness makes now. We live it and we can, with sufficient energy, move it about. "