Artifact

This was what never failed to stir her—the unfathomable gulf between today’s thinking and the way the ancients thought. They were truly alien, not merely innocent agrarians with a foolish faith.

Just because something’s crazy, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

Still, Claire hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed—finally to lose.

She stood up. “Professional? Ha! My father used to say, you have to be able to tell a tracheotomist from a cutthroat. Well, I can.”

Hubris. They disliked questions unless there were clear answers. They believed so much in their method that they conjured up certainty out of undeniable risk.

“We will be just like the USA. Only we will be more honest.”

”We’ve got two parties.”

“No you do not. You have only the party of the banks, of the money men, and they divide it into two pieces for your voting.”

That was what drew him to mathematics. Not because it was rarefied, but because it probed to the subtle, deeper reality. People said that mathematicians were unworldly, and yammered on about how Einstein couldn’t make correct change. Nonsense. Einstein just didn’t give a damn. It was the subtle, the beautiful that concerned him.

Archeology is mostly a process of making associations between objects, and every discovery opens up possible resonances with things we already have. Sometimes, simply wandering through a museum or a site can open your eyes.

Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe.

It was one thing to be instantly attracted to a woman, and another to like her independence, the way she took no notice of what he thought of her, one way or the other. She was indeed a modern woman—not aggressive, yet not submissive. A self-possessed apartness, a lack of cling...

Yes, that was what held his attention: her reserve. The promise of depths you could not guess merely by seeing her in a swimsuit.

In popularizing a scientific development it was always crucial to sail the narrow strait between the Scylla of professional contempt and the Charybdis of public befuddlement.

Professors everywhere deplored examinations as an archaic technique, a fossil that recalled little red schoolhouses and memorizing the capitals of all the states. Regular progress and daily diligence mattered more, they felt, not an hour spent compressing months of learning onto a few sheets of paper. Far better to stress homework, classroom participation and the professor’s judgment. Regrettably, the large size of classes, and the requirements of society itself for pseudo-objective standards kept the exam structure firmly in place.

She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup.

But no, the friend’s indictment was off target; he simply liked them tall, as long as they didn’t slump down in a forlorn effort to appear shorter. It seemed obvious to him that no woman looked good trying to be something she wasn’t.

The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.