“In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.”

“The end of the chapter is the beginning of the new chapter.”

“The first chapter sells the book; the last chapter sells the next book.”

“The Quantum Universe has a quotation from me in every chapter — but it's a damn good book anyway.”

“Much of the obscurity of our effort so far against terrorism originates in the now official idea that the enemy is evil and that we are (therefore) good, which is the precise mirror image of the official idea of the terrorists.”

“Usually, when people get to the end of a chapter, they close the book and go to sleep. I deliberately write a book so when the reader gets to the end of the chapter, he or she must turn one more page.”

“The next chapter is likely to provoke many mathematicians. This can't be helped. Mathematics is not what they think it is.”

“And so we go.' It's my way of saying that I'm prepared for the next adventure. The next chapter. The next challenge. Whatever comes my way, I'm ready for it. Because that truly is the way it was meant to be…”

““My destiny is accomplished and I die content.” How often she made such quotations as these, said or felt or was them! For just as many Americans want art to be Life, so this American novelist wanted life to be Art, not seeing that many of the values—though not, perhaps, the final ones—of life and art are irreconcilable; so that her life looked coldly into the mirror that it held up to itself, and saw that it was full of quotations, of data and analysis and epigrams, of naked and shameful truths, of facts: it saw that it was a novel by Gertrude Johnson.”

“So we die before our own eyes; so we see some chapters of our lives come to their natural end.”