“Wherever I'm going, I'll be there to apply the formula. I'll keep the secret intact.It's simple arithmetic.It's a story problem.If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour, and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall?You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiple it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don't initiate a recall.If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don't recall.”

“There is no greater sorrow than to recall in misery the time when we were happy.”

“Each star had cost an effort. For each there had been planning, watching and anticipation. Each one recalled to me a place, a time, a season. Each one now has a personality. The stars, in short, had become my stars.”

“Everyone hated Calculus. Quadratic equations, parabolas, logarithms, trigonometry - you name it. It was like floating in an endless, frictionless void traveling at x miles per hour at a descension rate of one half the speed of gravity. Solve for x.”

“In the Ebbinghaus curve, or forgetting curve, R stands for memory retention, s is the relative strength of memory and t is time. The power of a memory can be built through repetition, but it is the memory we are recalling when we speak, not the event. And stories are annealed in the telling, edited by turns each time they are recalled...People remember what they can live with more often than how they lived.”

“Someone once said that nothing costs more and yields less benefit than revenge,” Aomame said.“Winston Churchill. As I recall it, though, he was making excuses for the British Empire’s budget deficits. It has no moral significance.”