Quotes from Robert Masello

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks." —Albert Einstein, in an interview with Alfred Werner for Liberal Judaism

But Einstein had always admired Freud as a philosopher more than as a scientist, and had found his essays more thought-provoking than they were definitive.

If the world is rationally constructed and has meaning," Kurt said, his head down as he carefully lifted a single strand of spaghetti from his plate, "then there must be such a thing as an afterlife. Otherwise, what is the meaning of this one?" "Oh, Kurt," Adele said, "why must everything have a meaning? Maybe we are just here to eat spaghetti and talk and laugh and," she paused, replenishing her glass and raising it to her host, "drink good wine.

Those who converted were forced to prove it by making an animal sacrifice, and soon the skies over Egypt were filled with the smoke from burning ewes and calves, bulls and pigs and goats.

The sight of it made her want to weep. She was alone in the boat—alone in the world—and the tiller was already lurching wildly from one side to the other, screeching louder than the gulls swooping in and out of the fog. The hollow place in her heart, the place where she had already stored so many deaths, would now have to find room for Sergei's, too.

But how could she have forgotten who he was—a man who could lose himself in a single book, not to mention a world-class, open-stack library, for hours on end?

the reason for Diocletian's hasty retreat around 304 AD. Most historians assumed it had something to do with the unceasing political struggles in the Roman senate—his rival Galerius had been restive, and it was plain he meant to seize the reins of power—and Diocletian may have felt the need to hurry back home to exert his control once again, though that theory was contradicted by his almost immediate retirement once he got there.

While there might be some people who were natural diplomats, she wasn't one of them. She was forever butting heads with people, challenging them when she should have been convincing them, raising hackles where she should have been raising support. She had always been in a hurry, without always knowing where she wanted to go; she was too impatient to wait for the right time or the right confluence of events.

When his theory of relativity had been challenged by a fellow physicist—whose own theories, Einstein contended, relied too much upon random events and coincidences—he had replied: "Subtle is the Lord, but malicious he is not." He still believed that to be true; there was an order to everything in the universe, and the greatest achievement would lie in deciphering it.

And when this emperor had come to the desert," it read, "with his camels and chariots, with his army of soldiers and slaves, the sand itself arose in a great storm, blinding their eyes.

But that is precisely what war is. It is madness," Einstein said, pinching the cigarette between two fingers. "Nothing less than madness.

The storm to end all storms is coming," he had said, "and the only question is going to be who wields the lightning and the thunder." Oppenheimer had always been prone to such melodramatic language. "It has to be us.

When the dawn at last arose, the demon raised my staff to strike again, but I, too, took hold of it. I called upon the Lord to send me strength, and the devil was defeated by a fire from the Heavens. In Christ's name, I bound him then, and kept him prisoner.

clambered to the top of a pile of ruins, feeling his way over broken bricks and burnt timbers and shattered glass. His

He couldn't risk getting into any trouble with the university, however. It had taken a lot of cunning and a lot of time, to get securely situated there, and anything that called undue attention to him, or his work, would be dangerous to everyone involved. Most of all, to Andy.

The paratroopers have landed," the voice on the radio said, "and all around me, they're freeing themselves from their chutes." Dr. Rashid leaned forward, hanging on every word. Tonight's broadcast was coming all the way from Holland, where soldiers from the 101st Airborne had been dispatched to capture the bridges along the Dutch/Belgian border.

I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth—rocks." —Albert Einstein, in an

He was especially known for treating skin afflictions, often with an application of pork fat, and as a result, he had come to be associated with such skin diseases as eczema and the eponymous Saint Anthony's fire.

Hades, however, had been clever. After agreeing to return her to her mother, but just before she had set foot above ground again, he had persuaded Persephone to eat four pomegranate seeds. Because she had done so, she was obligated to return for four months of every year to the underworld—a time when her mother grieves again." The wreath settled upon her brow like a tiara. "That's why we have winter," Machen said, almost

soul," he'd said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, "is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free. When my time comes, let my soul soar into the wind and the sky. Wherever its natural home is meant to be, that's where it will go.

Gödel freely admitted that the intuition of a concept was not proof; he argued that it was the opposite. "We do not analyze intuition to see a proof, but by intuition we see something without a proof." Recently, however, he'd gone beyond that conclusion, too, and asserted that there must then logically be a realm unknowable to our simple senses, where ultimate truth resided.

Mankind had made it all up out of whole cloth because, at bottom, everyone was afraid of the dark, afraid of ultimate extinction, afraid to face the fact that individual lives meant nothing in the grand scheme of a vast and utterly indifferent cosmos.