“The center of the chessboard is a magnet, which pulls to itself all the pieces. Therefore the most beautiful and amazing moves, for me, are those with which a piece, counteracting the gravitational force of the center, suddenly fly to the edge of the board.”

“To the angel of death, we are all like chess pieces on the chessboard.”

“Suddenly, I don’t know how to explain it, the chess pieces seemed to come alive for me. It was like I could now see the chess pieces moving on the board on their own. I started beating everybody. I, the slowest of the slow, had now gone something like a hundred games without losing. I could do no wrong. It was magical how the pieces spoke to me, showing me where to move.”

“Gravitational force is simple, and a thing by itself, as also are electric and magnetic forces as long as the electric and magnetic poles stand at rest. But as soon as motion comes into the picture, the whole situation is changed. Forces of new kinds come into play, for moving electric charges exert magnetic forces in addition to the electric forces they exert when at rest, while moving magnets exert electric forces in addition to the magnetic forces they exert while at rest. When the exact laws governing these intricate laws had been discovered by a great number of experimenters, Clerk Maxwell succeeded in expressing them in a mathematical form which was both simple and elegant.”

“Yours is a race of pawns,” Tzadkiel told me. “You move forward only, unless we move you back to begin the game again. But not all the pieces on the board are pawns.”

“Superficially at least the forces of electricity and magnetism seem to present the same kind of problem as gravitation. Experiment shows that two electrically charged bodies attract one another (or repel if their charges are of the same kind) with a force which conforms to the same mathematical law as the force of gravitation - both forces fall off inversely as the inverse square of the distance. The same is true of the magnetic force also; two magnetic poles attract or repel one another with a force which again follows the law of the inverse square of the distance.”

“Music is for me like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together. He takes all the pieces in his hand, throws them into the world, and we have to recreate the picture from the pieces.”

“Great men don't 'move to the center' — great men move the center!”

“But even this piece of flattery couldn't distract me from the fact that I was in the center of the Fae realm, blind, stark naked, and without the slightest idea of what was going on.”

“Move like a beam of light;
Fly like lightning,
Strike like thunder,
Whirl in circles around
A stable center.”