Rivka Galchen Quotes

To date, most things that I've seen use the internet as a delivery vehicle for old style teaching. We're taking steps in the direction - it'll be a long, iterative process - to create new kinds of educational experiences by using this new tool of the internet.

Sometimes failing is what's needed. I think it can put people in a good mood, to see someone fail. Let people entertain themselves. I think that's one of the reasons people are so lonely in this country. Because they always have to rush out and have someone else in the room entertain them. It's terrible, the loneliness here. People live in coffins...

The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here.

Now it seems there are many more varieties of 'normal' family.

I barely even know how I didn't feel. I didn't feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I did't even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn't feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn't feel like talking to someone who would understand.

Up until I was about thirty, I had a strong preference for men over women. I mean specifically as friends, as people to talk to. If a male and a female exactly alike were to enter a room, in my deformed perceptions the male was magnified into glory. It wasn't until this primitive preference began to expire, for whatever reasons, that it began to bother me that it had previously existed.

I should at least have learned more about how it had come to be that Rema had abandoned her mother, before I asked her to marry - and hopefully not abandon - me. But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon and actually I'm glad love does that, I shouldn't complain about love or love's perspective - distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing.

Often times in physics we want to talk about empty space as a first step toward nothingness, but nothingness is far more profound than empty space. Nothingness is the absence of everything including space itself.

Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate

But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can't help people eat cereal any longer.

I've always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions.

He is my unicorn, though ... That's how I felt falling in love with him, as if I'd found a creature of myth.

It's true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.

That's something that would really sell. I mean, I admire that you tell stories of make-believe people in worlds that don't exist and that have no relevance to how we live. That can be nice, but people also like things that are uplifting and practical.
(From the short story: The Late Novels of Gene Hackman)

I had considered envying men before
I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania
but I don't really envy those things, and I'm not sure I even believe in them
but this, the covert-baby-having thing, was the first real thing.

The magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser's work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be?

No authority is wholly natural or native; when we're not borrowing from our neighbors, we're borrowing from our ancestors. One reason art tends to come from looking outward and not just inward is that we're always speaking from a shaky authority, even when narrating our own experiences - maybe especially when narrating just ourselves.

I don't know if math is real in the sense that it's woven into the fabric of the cosmos, or if it's something that we invent and impose upon it. I don't know.

You'll never get over Ilan. And that will one day horrify you. But soon enough you'll settle on a replacement object for all that love of yours, which does you about as much good as a life jacket in a train wreck.

I'd consider it profession enough to have streaky bleached hair, to wear a green scarf, to spill spicy teas, to walk (slightly) unevenly on high heels. What more is there to give to the world than that? I realize this sentiment of mine is currently considered appalling, but these days I find the popularity of ideas even more meaningless than ever before.

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.