Knowledge:
Key Quotes:
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 left 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. (page 53)
Themes: Newtonian Physics, time
Valentine: It makes me so
happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing.... 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 of being alive, when almost everything you thought you
knew is wrong. (page 64)
Themes: Science/Maths, chaos theory, academic research
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 Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my
universe without you. (page 84)
Themes: Conflict between maths and
literature, thinking vs feeling
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.
Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in. That’s why you can’t believe in
the afterlife, Valentine. Believe in the after, by all means, but not the life.
Believe in God, the soul, the spirit, the infinite, believe in angels if you
like, but not in the big celestial get together for an exchange of views. I f
the answers are in the back of the book I can wait, but what a drag. Better to
struggle on knowing failure is final. (page 102-103)
Themes: Conflict between literature/maths, religion, meaning
of life, academic research
Septimus:
When we have found all the mysteries and lost
all the meaning, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
Thomasina: Then we will
dance. (Page 128)
Themes:
Love/romance, meaning of life, relationships between men and women
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