- septimus "no more you can, time must needs run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever."
- thomasina "each week i plot your equations dot for dot, xs against ys in all manner of algebraical relation, and every week they draw themselves as commonplace geometry, as if the world of forms were nothing but arcs and angles. god's truth, septimus, if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose? do we believe nature is written in numbers?"
- septimus "we shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. the procession is very long and life is very short. we die on the march. but there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it."
- valentine "the unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is. it's how nature creates itself, on every scale, the snowflake and the snowstorm. it makes me so happy. to be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing."
- valentine "the future is disorder. a door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. it's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong."
- valentine "the questions you're asking don't matter, you see. it's like arguing who got there first with the calculus. the english say newton, the germans say leibnitz. but it doesn't matter. personalities. what matters is the calculus. scientific progress. knowledge."
- bernard "if knowledge isn't self-knowledge it isn't doing much, mate. is the universe expanding? is it contracting? is it standing on one leg and singing 'when the father painted the parlour'? leave me out. i can expand my universe without you."
- hannah "it's all trivial—your grouse, my hermit, bernard's byron. comparing what we're looking for misses the point. it's wanting to know that makes us matter."
- valentine "see? in an ocean of ashes, islands of order. patterns making themselves out of nothing. i can't show you how deep it goes. each picture is a detail of the previous one, blown up. and so on. for ever."
- septimus "when we have found all the meanings and lost all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore." thomasina "then we will dance. is this a waltz?" septimus "it will serve."
- septimus and thomasina continue to dance, fluently, to the piano.
nov 12 2014 ∞
nov 12 2014 +
nov 12 2014 +