Quotes by Paul Hoffman

...the heart of a child can take forty-nine blows before it’s damaged for ever and what’s done can never be undone.

...Again she did not seem to hear, still looking into Cale’s eyes. Then slowly, hopelessly, she dropped her gaze. “I understand,” she said. It was that, of course, that pierced him as if she had stabbed him through the heart. To him it was the sound of lost faith and it was unendurable. He felt he’d become a kind of god in her eyes, and it was simply impossible to give up her adoration.

Many are called, few are chosen.

Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it as it is to its victims—the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates.

When he said someone had died, Erdős meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had left, the person had died.

Mathematician need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.

The battle had been as hideous as you might expect between one side who were simply not afraid to die and another who regarded death as merely a door to the eternal life.