“There was no answer. I looked up.Epsilon’s light shone out onto a picture on the wall.A round picture in a square frame.The golden symbol of O. The One. The symbol of perfection.The symbol of eternity. The One without beginning or end.The One who is the beginning and the end.The One to whom time is meaningless. The One who could do whatever he wanted with time. What had Mrs. Shiling said, in the kitchen, a year ago?“Time is nothing. Not to him. A moment in time. What is that t him?”Quivering from head to toe, I stared up at that simple O.”

“Nothing is harder to understand than a symbolic work. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.”

“The river is one of my favorite metaphors, the symbol of the great flow of Life Itself. The river begins at Source, and returns to Source, unerringly. This happens every single time, without exception. We are no different.”

“Lecter sits in his armchair with a big pad of butcher paper doing calculations. The pages are filled with the symbols both of astrophysics and particle physics. There are repeated efforts with the symbols of string theory. The few mathematicians who could follow him might say his equations begin brilliantly and then decline, doomed by wishful thinking. Dr. Lecter wants time to reverse — no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time. He wants increasing order to point the way”.”

“The O was not a number – a zero. It was a letter – the first letter of the word One. But it was far more than that. It was a symbol in itself – the symbol of unity. The perfect circle. Of the complete unit. The never ending. The One.And the snake? The snake was not a perfect circle. It could never be unified – not even if it began to eat its own tail. The symbol of one who depends only upon itself for nourishment.”

“Tatiana...you and I had only one moment..." said Alexander. "A single moment in time, in your time and mine...one instant, when another life could have still been possible." He kissed her lips. "Do you know what I'm talking about?" When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street."I know that moment," whispered Tatiana.”