Janna Levin > Quotes

“I don't believe that math and nature respond to democracy. Just because very clever people have rejected the role of the infinite, their collective opinions, however weighty, won't persuade mother nature to alter her ways. Nature is never wrong.”
― Janna Levin, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space

“from a contradiction you may deduce everything”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“Maybe truth is just like that. You can see it, but only out of the corner of your eye.

Adele never demands of him any actual conversation. She seems to understand that she is there to keep time and drown out the alarm of more individuated noises. The clink of a pin drop that can fray his nerves, the grinding of gravel beneath the weight of a man on the street, the spike of a dulled conversation as a couple pass beneath his window over Langegasse, the mounting pitch of the conspiratorial exchange as they approach.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“...we are the product of this universe and I think it can be argued that the entire cosmic code is imprinted in us. Just as our genes carry the memory of our biological ancestors, our logic carries the memory of our cosmological ancestry. We are not just imposing human-centric notions on a cosmos independent of us. We are progeny of this cosmos and our ability to understand it is an inheritance.”
― Janna Levin, How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space

“His weakness in this game, and in life, is that he's never prepared for how others will act. They are predetermined but too complex to solve or predict, and there are rules that he is just no good at applying.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

“As the blood poured from his tattered heart into the open air and his brain suffocated, all those incomplete thoughts of Wittgenstein decayed with the dying neurons. Neural connections in the gray matter storing memories and ideas in their ordered configurations fired across the gaps, last gaps of mental life. Thoughts on Truth and Will were erased as flesh sloshed soft and limp against alabaster, no more than rotting human fruit.”
― Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines