Important Quotations Explained
When you stir your rice pudding, Septimus, the spoonful of jam spreads itself round making red trails like the picture of a meteor in my astronomical atlas. But if you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again. Indeed, the pudding does not notice and continues to turn pink just as before. Do you think this is odd?
If you could stop every atom in its position and direction, and if your mind could comprehend all the actions thus suspended, then if you were really, really good at algebra you could write the formula for all the future; and although nobody can be so cleaver to do it, the formula must exist just as if one could.
If you knew the algorithm and fed it back say ten thousand times, each time there'd be a dot somewhere on the screen. You'd never where to expect the next dot. But gradually you'd start to see this shape….
SEPTIMUS It will go to infinity or zero, or nonsense
THOMASINA No, if you set apart the minus roots they square back to sense
When we have found all the meanings and lost all the mysteries, we will be alone, on an empty shore.
