Eric > Eric's Quotes

“Definition 20. If some new vertices of degree 2 are added to some of the edges of a graph G, the resulting graph H is called an expansion of G.”
― Richard J. Trudeau, Introduction to Graph Theory

“A basic rule of mathematical life: if the universe hands you a hard problem, try to solve an easier one instead, and hope the simple version is close enough to the original problem that the universe doesn’t object.”
― Jordan Ellenberg, How Not To Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday

“A weed is a plant out of place.’ Let me repeat that. A weed is a plant out of place.’ I find a hollyhock in my cornfield, and it’s a weed. I find it in my yard, and it’s a flower.”
― Jim Thompson, The Killer Inside Me

“When it comes to the past, everyone writes fiction.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“Love you, too.” That sounded perfunctory rather than fervent.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we’re standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we’ll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That’s why your folks’ clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who’s destined to be buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“His derby was tilted at its usual insouciant angle, and there was a cigarette parked behind one ear.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“They see nothing. It’s like their eyes are connected to their assholes instead of their brains. Everything goes right through.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“getting up to piss at three AM, which some poet or other has rightly dubbed the Hour of the Wolf.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“As W. H. Auden pointed out, the Reaper takes the rolling in money, the screamingly funny, and those who are very well hung.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“I’d taken a few swipes with Occam’s razor, and that was what I’d ended up with, but that didn’t make it so. I really didn’t want to have to retreat and regroup with Peele and Alice breathing down my neck on either side. There were still those last few boxes, though. It was possible that Sod’s Law was operating, and that the ghost’s anchor was just going to turn out to be one of the documents at the very bottom of the stack.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“Fortune favors the pure of heart and the brassy of bollock.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“It wasn’t what I was expecting, but like I’ve always said, if life gives you lemmings, jump off a cliff.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“They weren’t random; nothing with a human mind as the operating system ever can be. But they were random enough.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“There’s a kind of silence that just has the overwhelming feel of someone trying desperately not to break it, and that was the kind of silence I was breathing in right then.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I dangled for a moment like the bob on the end of a pendulum telling borrowed time.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I knew better than to clutch at straws purely so that I could flog dead horses with them.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“let him who keeps regular office hours cast the first stone.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“He knows I don’t come around just to sniff wine and swap gossip, but he hates the fact that our relationship is mutually abusive. Like all conspiracy nuts, he’s a romantic at heart.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“I chased my thoughts around in decreasing circles for a while before getting back to the point—which I’d been avoiding pretty strenuously.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“But when the choice is between doing nothing and doing harm, surely nothing is the wiser option?”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“It was full of the usual strata of desk-drawer shit, and I could have excavated for five minutes without finding anything more useful than pencil shavings and paper clips.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“William Blake is dreaming of Jerusalem under that sod, and Daniel Defoe is probably dreaming about something a fair bit earthier. You’ve also got John Owen and Isaac Watts, the reservoir dogs of eighteenth-century theology. What can I tell you? I just feel at ease in their company.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“a pause so heavy it wasn’t just pregnant but ready to break its waters and deliver.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“a good stare communicates itself by means other than sight.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“All in all, I was feeling the smug satisfaction of a job well begun and therefore half done.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“My hand was a balloon sculpture, nerveless and fragile; it wouldn’t do what it was told.”
― Mike Carey, The Devil You Know

“No doubt about it, I was a mess. I needed to go and lie down in a darkened room until my body decided to let me off the hook for the abuse I’d subjected it to over the past couple of days.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“The stairwell smelled of piss and stale beer—two stages in a conjugation that usually ends with “dead-drunk guy facedown in his own vomit.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle

“Suburban transcendence for the Ikea age.”
― Mike Carey, Vicious Circle