Real people have a way of banging against the doors you’ve closed; they know your name, your phone number. They live with you.

I think it’s very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.

You are not supposed to get it. It’s a paradox. All of mathematics is built on paradoxes. That’s the biggest paradox of all-all this orderliness, and at the heart, impossibility. Contradiction. Heaven built on the foundations of hell.

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

For one reason or another, this program has never had a national publication.

It was an instinct to put the world in order that powered her mending split infinitives and snipping off dangling participles, smoothing away the knots and bumps until the prose before her took on a sheen, like perfect caramel.

The Term Paper Artist' represents two models of writing, one of the little boy bouncing his ball, generating stories for the sheer pleasure of it, and the besieged adult, writing to make a living, having to contend with a very competitive, very unreliable world in which public image counts.

Childhood smells of perfume and brownies.

I think it's very funny that someone would exaggerate to make himself look worse.

'You might think of combinatorics as a machine too', the major says. 'A different sort of machine, though. Have you heard of Babbage's analytic engine? He never built it. ... I have an analytic machine of my own-right here.' He taps his own skull.