“I feel like our whole friendship was a lie. She's probably the only person I've ever really opened up to, and the whole time she was hiding stuff from me. I just don't feel like I can trust somebody like that.”

“And sometimes I sit there late at night or early in the morning, and I think about the vastness of the ocean, of the sky, of the spaces between us and the nearest stars, about the incredible, unfathomable bigness of it all.”

“Yeah, well. You're my best friend, you know, and I love you.”

“But here, Ms. Pelletier, is the thing. Without infinitesimals, the calculus as we know and love it simply wouldn't exist. It is these nearly-zero, sort-of-zero, sometimes-zero quantities that allow us to understand the world. Something which seems to be nearly nothing turns out to be crucial to everything. So though I, or for you that matter, or any of us, may be, as a collection of atoms, practically indistinguishable from zero, this does not necessarily mean we are insignificant. Indeed, it may be that we are actually crucially important.”

“Do you know why I love mathematics?""Because it blew your mind for free when you couldn't get drugs?"Eccles snorted in surprise. "Well, yes, but there's another reason.”

“if you wait for everyone else to do the right thing before you do the right thing, then you'll never do what's right. You have to do what's right even if other people aren't. Maybe even especially if other people aren't.”

“But those eyes, those big green eyes of hers, they bore right into me with crippling force. She wanted it too much; the space Tommy had left in her, she wanted me to fill it. And I couldn't. She looked too young and too scared. almost like she didn't really want it either, she just needed it. I couldn't stick it in and fuck her pain away. I did not know how to fuck at all, let alone as therapy.”