Stuart Rojstaczer > Quotes

“Her craziness was happily wed to her intellect. There are no reasonable geniuses in this world, I am convinced.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“We expect and demand people to maintain bonds with family. It doesn’t matter whether you love or hate your relatives, even ones you’ve legally divorced. As long as there are children involved, you stick together.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Survival, to my mind, implies a finite probability that without luck and cunning, you will perish.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“The inability of Americans to value intellect is, to me, maddening. If someone possesses physical beauty they will not be cloistered or hidden in dark shadows. No, they are expected to be a source of pleasing scenery to others. We are not frightened in this country by beauty. We celebrate it, as we should. But what about beautiful brains, the kind that create amazing worlds out of nothing but thoughts, that can find a way to intricately bond elements of our lives that common wisdom tells us are inert? Why should anyone hide this intellect ever? No. Fuck boring financiers like Warren Buffett...there is no such thing as unnecessary beauty, physical or intellectual.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“But grief always hits hard and somehow lingers longer than exultation in your mind and heart,”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“It is like breathing to us, and to ignore math in this story would be akin to listening to Frank Zappa without ever having taken hallucinogens, an incomplete experience.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“In this country, people buy T-shirts extolling their survival skills after snowstorms and heat waves. I used to get angry about this behavior, which I considered to be a childish display of false endurance. How can a country be so weak to think that a little snow or a little spike in a thermometer is actual hardship? But now … I’m almost pleased to see these T-shirts appear every few years. Now they indicate to me that this country is so secure and wealthy that actual hardship for many is almost impossible. These celebrations of minor calamities are in essence a signal that the people of this country feel so safe that they’ve turned survival into a silly game. Unfortunately, most nations are not like the United States. Danger is real for almost everyone most anywhere else.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“The dead don’t come back. Not to this world. This world is too cruel for anyone to want to come back.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“That’s what I have told people who have asked for advice through the years: focus on what is beautiful and pursue that beauty.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Tornadoes are a good metaphor for how bad things happen in our lives. They build from small disturbances that usually don’t mean a thing and almost always dissipate. But somehow one particular random bad event attracts others, and all of them together grow and attract more nasty stuff. Once it gets up to a critical size, the odds of it growing even larger are no longer remote.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“But to try to achieve something massively significant in a field where you’re by and large useless after your fortieth birthday—and my father was seventy-seven—is the height of both delusion and optimism.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Our capacity for love isn’t like a gallon jug that you fill up from rest stop to rest stop as you take a drive across the country. It can swell, and sadly, it can shrink. Less is not more.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“We aren’t rednecks. We’re European. Big difference.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“We are a people pathologically in love with mourning not only our deceased family members but our national heroes as well. Poets, mathematicians, philosophers, politicians, sports heroes, cosmonauts. I swear that the funeral is to Russia what baseball is to the United States, its national pastime.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“I liken my marriage in my twenties to the ill-chosen shot by a basketball player, done without any thought from an impossible angle and motivated by a mix of pure adrenaline and ego, which his coach watches with complete despair as he involuntarily shouts “nooooo.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Solutions to problems never trespass into anything of real value.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Very unusual. American women aren’t like this, typically. They want to be wooed. Sweet-talked. Romanced. They want a big fantasy first. Reality comes later. I never have luck with American women.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“I could insult him for his pedestrian intelligence and whacky ideas, but even I know that there is a bit more to life than intellect.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Who?” “I don’t remember fucking names. But they called. My assistant answered. Always these buy-me-a-vowel names.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“There is an old joke in Finland, a country proud of its collective introspective character and shyness. “How do you know when a Finnish man likes a woman? He stares at her shoes instead of his.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Disappointment for Slavs is always more poetic and profound, as well as more frequent, than it is for Americans.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“To this day I don’t understand this country well. The cheery optimism. The lack of concern about the past. The openness to strangers who simply show a smile and give a firm handshake”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“Do not fall in love with someone when that love is heavily dependent on the goodwill and kindness of your parents.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“With my family, historical facts are subsidiary to narrative, and narrative must always show the narrator in the best light.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“I thought about my family. It was small by any standard, shrunken to a handful by Hitler, Stalin, and divorce.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“In a country as profoundly anti-intellectual as ours it is predictable that our leaders will do whatever they can in order not to appear smart in public.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“I decided to practice revenge in a calmer way, by living well.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“To Americans, the outward display of intelligence is considered unseemly. The Donald Trumps of the world can boast about their penthouses and Ferraris, their women can wear baubles the size of Nebraska, and no one says boo. If you have money, you’re almost always expected to flaunt it. But intellect? This is something else entirely. Women, especially, are supposed to play dumb.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“I didn’t know, even vaguely, the difference between physical deprivation and the emotional loss of one’s child, even when you know that child is healthy and well.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva

“There is a well-known joke—at least well known in mathematics—about how mathematicians work. A mathematician and a Starbucks barista are each placed in front of a stove with a kettle and a nearby faucet and told to make boiling water. Both do the same thing. They fill the kettle with water from the faucet, light the stove with a match, and place the water-filled kettle on the stove. Mission accomplished. The mathematician and the Starbucks barista are next placed in front of a stove with a kettle that they are told is filled with clean water and told to make boiling water yet again. The barista lifts the kettle off the stove for a moment, lights the stove, and puts the kettle back on. The mathematician lifts the kettle off the stove, pours out the water into a sink, puts the newly emptied kettle back on the stove and says, “The problem has been reduced to the previously solved case. Q.E.D.”
― Stuart Rojstaczer, The Mathematician's Shiva