Nice Thoughts from the book "The Rule of Four"

"To count a hundred million stars 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."

"..Finally it was my friends who changed-or, I guess, finally I was the one who changed them. I'm not sure if I wanted friends who understood me better, or saw me differently, or what exactly, but the old ones , like my old clothes, just didn't fit anymore.

The thing that people like to say to victims is that time is a great healer.The great healer is what they say, as if time were a doctor. But after six years of thinking on the subject i have a different impression. Time is the guy at the amusement park who paints shirts with an airbrush. He sprays out the color in a fine mist until it's just lonely particles floating in the air, waiting to be plastered in place. And what comes of it all, the design on the shirt at the end of the day, ususally isn't much to see. I suspect that whosoever buys that shirt, the one great patron of everlasting theme park, whoever he is, wakes up in the morning and wonders what he ever saw in it. We're the paint in the analogy. Time is what disperses us."

"..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."

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

"It is the greatest houses and the tallest trees that the gods bring low with bolts and thunder. For the gods love to thwart whatever is greater than the rest. They do not suffer pride in anyone but themselves."

"Like all things in this 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."

"..I've always wondered why Carrachi put two women in that engraving, when he only needed one. Somewhere in that is the moral I took from the story:in the geometry of love, everything is triangular. For every Tom and Jenny, there is Julius; for every Katie and Tom there is Francesco Colonna; and the tongue of desire is forked, kissing two but loving one."

"The two hardest things to contemplate in life are failure and age; and those are one and the same. Perfection is the natural consequence of eternity: wait long enough, and anything will realize its potential. Coals becomes diamonds, sands become pearls, apes become men. It's simply not given to us, in one lifetime, to see those consummations, and so every failure becomes a reminder of death.

But 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. What's a monkey to think, who with a typewriter and eternity still can't eke out Shakespeare?"