I suspect you're thinking of Pascal,' Finkler said, finally.'Only he said the opposite. He said you might as well wager on God because that way, even if He doesn't exist, you've nothing to lose. Whereas if you wager against God and He does exist...' 'You're in the shit.

A waitress, bringing Finkler more hot water, interrupted Treslove's answer. Finkler always asked for more hot water no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed.

You can't have a church town without belief and you can't have belief without intolerance.

If that made him heavy company sometimes, so be it. Who decreed that life was to be one long rowdy masquerade (punctuated with those little pets of melancholy indulged by a crowd who made a religion of their feelings)?

How do you go on knowing that you will never again - not ever, ever - see the person you have loved? How do you survive a single hour, a single minute, a single second of that knowledge? How do you hold yourself together?

But he didn't have to listen to his father. Taking after your father was optional, wasn't it?

to bar communication between intellectuals, who are always our best hope of peace, is particularly self-defeating and inane. It declares, inter alia, that we have a) made up our minds about what we think, b) closed our minds to what others think, and c) chosen to go on hearing nothing with which we happen to disagree.

A life was owned by the person who lived it, he believed. What happened didn't always happen because you wanted it to, but what you made of it was your responsibility.

An artist owed a duty to nothing except his own irresponsibility. It was OK for an artist to frolic in the water, no matter how bloody the waves or how high the tide rose. An ethicist had an obligation to drown.

So the mathematician and the artist are companioned in the same dark, and do obeisance to the same gods.