Symmetry Life Quotes

There are several ways to react to being lost. One is to panic: this was usually Valentina's first impulse. Another is to abandon yourself to lostness, to allow the fact that you've misplaced yourself to change the way you experience the world.

My dear, In the midst of hate, I found there was, within me, an invincible love. In the midst of tears, I found there was, within me, an invincible smile. In the midst of chaos, I found there was, within me, an invincible calm. I realized, through it all, that… In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back. Truly yours, Albert Camus” I like this because only one part is usually quoted but the full quote has such symmetry.

...we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

Life is sometimes novel-shaped, mocking the efforts of those authors who, in an effort to make their novels life-shaped, spurn the easy symmetry and cheap resonance of reality.

I've lived my life like a serial killer; finish with one part, strangle it and move on to the next. Life in neat little boxes is life in neat little coffins, the dead bodies of the past laid out side by side. I am discovering, now, in the late afternoon of the day, that the dead still speak.

That’s the thing about living vicariously; it’s so much faster than actual living.

No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

Real beauty isn't about symmetry or weight or makeup; it's about looking life right in the face and seeing all its magnificence reflected in your own.

The human heart is my territory. I write about love because it’s the most important thing in the world. I write about sex because often it feels like the most important thing in the world.

Being in love is…anxious,” he said. “Wanting to please, worrying that she will see me as I really am. But wanting to be known. That is…you’re naked, moaning in the dark, no dignity at all…I wanted her to see me and to love me even though she knew everything I am, and I knew her

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

Never make a calculation until you know the answer. Make an estimate before every calculation, try a simple physical argument (symmetry! invariance! conservation!) before every derivation, guess the answer to every paradox and puzzle. Courage: No one else needs to know what the guess is. Therefore make it quickly, by instinct. A right guess reinforces this instinct. A wrong guess brings the refreshment of surprise. In either case life as a spacetime expert, however long, is more fun!

Along those lines, to get personal for a moment, I think the best way to die would be swallowed by a giant snake. Going feet first and whole into a slimy maw would give your life perfect symmetry.

We were to be the lightest of things, he and I, lifting each other up above the heaviness of life. If was because we knew that gravity is always part of the equation that we tried to defeat it.

Death, like fiction, is brutal in its symmetry. Take this story and strip it down -all the way back- until you are left with two points. Two dots on a vast, blank canvas, separeted by a sea of white. Here, we have come to the first point, where the batj is drawn and the hand is reachinh for the razor blade. I will meet you at the next, by the axle of a screaming wheel, the revolution of a clock, the closing of an orbit.

A tree has both straight and crooked branches; the symmetry of the tree, however, is perfect. Life is balanced like a tree. When you consider the struggles, difficulties, and sorrows as a part of it, then you see it as beautiful and perfect.

Even though the injury has faded, I still see it the way it was right after the accident: raw and red, a jagged lightning bold splitting the symmetry of my face. In this, I suppose I'm like a girl with an eating disorder, who weighs ninety-eight pounds but sees a fat person staring back at her from the mirror. It isn't even a scar to me, really. It's a map of where my life went wrong.

In harmony there is nothing strange. And life is a vast harmony. I've understood this. But, you see- the moulded whimsy of a frieze on a portico keeps us from recognizing, sometimes, the symmetry of the whole. . .

I often marveled that the interior peace of the woman was reflected so faithfully in her surroundings. Even the selection and arrangements of her possessions gave an aura of uncluttered calm. In addition, there was a directness in her approach to all of life--including housekeeping--that never failed to fascinate me. Miss Alice was a person to whom color, symmetry of line and contrast of texture were important.

But, Ashley, what are you afraid of?' 'Oh, nameless things. Things which sound very silly when they are put into words. Mostly of having life suddenly become too real, of being brought into personal, too personal, contact with some of the simple facts of life. It isn't that I mind splitting logs here in the mud, but I do mind what it stands for. I do mind, very much, the loss of the beauty of the old life I loved. Scarlett, before the war, life was beautiful. There was a glamor to it, a perfection and a completeness and a symmetry to it like Grecian art. Maybe it wasn't so to everyone. I know that now. But to me, living at Twelve Oaks, there was a real beauty to living. I belonged in that life. I was a part of it. And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. I resented their intrusion.

Seeing all life in perfect symmetry. Perceiving each day with righteous clarity. Living each moment in purposed reality. Believing each day is the start of eternity.

The fullness of life's balancing grace will demand the symmetry of recompense for all your loss and pain.

I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim...no framework...just bricks interlocked...no idea what I'm building or if it will stand...no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic unplotted bustle of human life.

There’s something magical in the act of holding another’s life in your hands. A kind of symmetry found in nature, where you’re given the opportunity to bring beasts to grisly fates or heal them instead.

He did not say so, but the words behind the words told me that he would rather have launched me into a good marriage than watch me row against the tide at my own work. It remains that a woman with an incomplete emotional life has herself to blame, while a man with no time for his heart just needs a wife.

I hadn't thought about it until just now, but the night Daniel rang our bell in the winter of 1970 was the end of November, the same time of year she died twenty-seven years later. I don't know what's that supposed to tell you; nothing, except that we take comfort in the symmetries we find in life because they suggest a design where there is none.

We'd not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, not gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we'd not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we'd been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.

She was tried for trying to take her own life,” Gascoigne said. “There’s a symmetry in that, do you not think? Tried for trying.

Many years later when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos for the boarding school. I learned that the world didn't see the inside of you, that it didn't care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that. My patients knew this. They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal angle or not. Beauty is an enormous unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.

In taking that photograph, I understood something I will never forget: how I wished to arrest all the beauty that came before me. Not the classical beauty of symmetry and exact proportions or the fancy of fashion, which is ever-changing with the seasons, but the beauty of a soul, that inner life that reveals itself so seldom, just for an instant, and only if you look closely and learn to see with an open heart.

My life has a certain amusing symmetry, if viewed with sufficient detachment.

Sometimes we are mush mouths because we like symmetry.

Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough.

If the universe is movement, it will not be in one direction only. We think of our lives as linear but it is the spin of the earth that allows us to observe time. Walk with me.

All the tension and darkness of our embodied life is held in a scaffolding of balance and symmetry, a natural order that is hard to see, like the ocean’s turbulence is held by its depths.

I fought angrily against seeing particular types of poetic organization because it seemed awful to see my own life and these actual events in that way. But when you put forth an intention into the universe to speak a certain truth and narrate a certain period of your life, you start to see the sorts of symmetries that you are not usually supposed to be able to see until you are on your deathbed and your life flashes before your eyes. And you see exactly why everything happened. And even the most painful things you’ve ever been through can seem unbearably beautiful.

Yet each, in itself—this was the uncanny, the anti-organic, the life-denying character of them all—each of them was absolutely symmetrical, icily regular in form. They were too regular, as substance adapted to life never was to this degree—the living principle shuddered at this perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death—Hans Castorp felt he understood now the reason why the builders of antiquity purposely and secretly introduced minute variation from absolute symmetry in their columnar structures.

Beauty, it seemed to Amineh, did not have to be extraordinary to be cherished. Maybe that was its secret, that it lived in the most common expressions of man and nature. The artisan had discovered it in a block of wood, which he had carved into a scene of a young woman sitting at a window. The locals had created it through the colorful geraniums they placed on small protrusions covering every square meter of their adobe walls. Even the animals were not immune. Who could doubt the starlings’ ecstatic flight around the minarets of the mosque was inspired by the symmetry of that aging structure.

The Lord wants there to be a symmetry or congruency in all the areas of our lives—the words we speak to men in symmetry with the words we speak to Him; our secret lives congruent with our public lives; our thoughts and actions in sync with one another—and in all things bringing Him glory.

Today biologists believe that during the “Cambrian explosion,” about half a billion years ago, nature experimented with a vast array of shapes and forms for tiny, emerging multicellular creatures. Some had spinal cords shaped like an X, Y, or Z. Some had radial symmetry like a starfish. By accident one had a spinal cord shaped like an I, with bilateral symmetry, and it was the ancestor of most mammals on Earth. So in principle the humanoid shape with bilateral symmetry, the same shape that Hollywood uses to depict aliens in space, does not necessarily have to apply to all intelligent life.

This was the reason why, when he would try to remember how he looked when dead, he could remember nothing clearly except the powerful sculptured weight and symmetry of his tremendous hands as they lay folded on his body in the coffin. The great hands had a stony, sculptured and yet living strength and vitality, as if Michelangelo had carved them. They seemed to rest there upon the groomed, bereft and vacant horror of the corpse with a kind of terrible reality as if there really is, in death, some energy of life that will not die, some element of man's life that must persist and that resumes into a single feature of his life the core and essence of his character.

Just like life, reality shifted and twisted out of her grasp [Elena's view on Gran Sasso]

She was used to the profound intimacy of her life with Julia, and she did not know that a cloud of hope and wild illusion is required to begin a relationship.

With this, in a powerful sense, our Question has been answered. The world, insofar as we speak of the world of Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, engineering, and everyday life, does embody beautiful ideas. The Core, which governs those domains, is profoundly rooted in concepts of symmetry and geometry, as we have seen. And it works its will, in quantum theory, through music-like rules. Symmetry really does determine structure. A pure and perfect Music of the Spheres really does animate the soul of reality. Plato and Pythagoras: We salute you!

She wanted him. Not in the sweet way of poetry, though there was that music in the symmetry of his body, in the careful meshing of bone and sinew and flesh that made him. Her want was raw. Physical. She felt it in the palms of her hands and the flesh of her lips and the heaviness of her breasts. In her life, she’d been hungry, and thirsty. She’d needed sleep. She had never, in her life, needed to touch a man.

Her life had a fearful symmetry at times. Fierce was its construction, and within its color and contour lay all the calamity of madness. Violence crept in with stillness or exploded with the ferocity of youth.

After sexual intercourse every animal is sad," he explained. "Don’t worry about it, Sophie. When the show’s over, you always feel empty. One second you’re energised like you’ve never been in your life, the next it’s all gone.

Stonewall Jackson was master of all he surveyed. Two Union forces were withdrawing from his front. There was a certain beautiful symmetry to it. The campaign, which started with a single enemy army pursuing Jackson southward through the valley, would end with two beaten Union armies withdrawing from him in a northerly direction. A week later, Jackson advised his mapmaker, Hotchkiss, to 'never take counsel of your fears.' A person who followed such advice would be doomed to a short life.

There is incredible symmetry in a tree, between its inner life and its outer life,between its rooted memory and its external active presence. A tree grows up and down at once and produces enough branches too incarnate it’s wild divinity. It doesn’t limit itself- it reaches for the sky and it reaches for the source, all in one kind of seamless movement. So I think landscape is an incredible, mystical teacher, and when you begin to tune into its sacred presence, something shifts inside you.

... it is about the distortions of symmetry and reciprocity in life: if you have the rewards, you must also get some of the risks— not let others pay the price of your mistakes. If you inflict risk onto others and they are harmed, you need to pay some price for it.

And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered, irregular, turbulent maze, mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from these globules themselves as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvae so bloodless and so hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes in a drop of water - things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each other, devouring each other - forms like nought ever beheld by the naked eye. As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head, crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary command against all evil beings. ("The House And The Brain")

His features were his mother’s: straight, slender nose, slightly longer than the required ratio of hairline to bridge, or chin to tip, that would have signified a face in perfect symmetry. Eyebrows at an upward angle conveyed a good listener, and his ears, though not wildly protruding, were definitely alert.

The tragic style of Aeschylus (I use the word "style" in the sense it receives in sculpture, and not in the exclusive signification of the manner of writing,) is grand, severe, and not unfrequently hard: that of Sophocles is marked by the most finished symmetry and harmonious gracefulness: that of Euripides is soft and luxuriant; overflowing in his easy copiousness, he often sacrifices the general effect to brilliant passages. The analogies which the undisturbed development of the fine arts among the Greeks everywhere furnishes, will enable us, throughout to compare the epochs of tragic art with those of sculpture. Aeschylus is the Phidias of Tragedy, Sophocles her Polycletus, and Euripides her Lysippus. Phidias formed sublime images of the gods, but lent them an extrinsic magnificence of material, and surrounded their majestic repose with images of the most violent struggles in strong relief. Polycletus carried his art to perfection of proportion, and hence one of his statues was called the Standard of Beauty. Lysippus distinguished himself by the fire of his works; but in his time Sculpture had deviated from its original destination, and was much more desirous of expressing the charm of motion and life than of adhering to ideality of form.

What I mean is, a professor is the only person on earth with the power to put a veritable frame around life— not the whole thing, God no— simply a fragment of it, a small wedge. He organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order— simply divine. The symmetry of a semester course. Consider the words themselves: the seminar, the tutorial, the advanced whatever workshop accessible only to seniors, to graduate fellows, to doctoral candidates, the practicum— what a marvelous word: practicum! You think me crazy. Consider a Kandinsky. Utterly muddled, put a frame around it, voilà — looks rather quaint above the fireplace. And so it is with the curriculum. That celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam. And what is the Final Exam? A test of one’s deepest understanding of giant concepts.

All life-forms are a kind of living information, transforms, as Bate-son put it, of messages. Not, by any means, actors against a static background. But rather, information added to an already extant and very complex information system. There is, in consequence, a pattern that connects each part to each other and to the whole. A pattern that runs through everything that Gaia has done. As Frank Herbert noted . . . There is in all things a pattern that is part of our universe. It has symmetry, elegance, and grace—those qualities you find always in that which the true artist captures. You can find it in the turning of the seasons, in the way sand trails along a ridge, in the branch clusters of the creosote bush or the patterns of its leaves.13

They teach you growing up that you are only one thing at a time—angry, lonely, content—but he’s never found that to be true. He is a dozen things at once. He is lost and scared and grateful, he is sorry and happy and afraid. But he is not alone. It is beginning to rain again, the air gone damp with the metallic scent of storms in the city, and Henry doesn’t care, thinks there is something to be said for symmetry.

Lagrange was born in Turin (now Italy), but his family was partly French ancestry on his father's side, who was originally wealthy, managed to squander all the family's fortune in speculations, leaving his son with no inheritance. Later in life, Lagrange described this economic catastrophe as the best thing that had ever happened to him: "Had I inherited a fortune I would probably not have cast my lot with mathematics.

WHY WAS A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN SUCH A BIG DEAL? Beauty was a sign of health and reproductive capability; thus, a beautiful woman historically had wide hips (for childbearing), body symmetry (indicating no deformities), hair and teeth that weren’t falling out (indicating health). And she was young—at the beginning of her fertile years. Society needed to reinforce men’s biological dependency on female beauty for the same reasons it needed to make women dependent on male income: dependency created an incentive to marry. A man who was addicted to a woman’s beauty, youth, and sex would temporarily “lose his mind”—he would make the irrational decision to support her for the rest of his life. Female beauty, then, can be thought of as nature’s marketing tool: the way of marketing a woman for the survival of her genes.42 Which is why female beauty is the world’s most potent drug.

Effectively, there is no democracy without such an unconditional symmetry in the rights to express yourself, and the gravest threat is the slippery slope in the attempts to limit speech on grounds that some of it may hurt some people’s feelings. Such restrictions do not necessarily come from the state itself, rather from the forceful establishment of an intellectual monoculture by an overactive thought police in the media and cultural life.

The ten-dimensional universe was a world of light. The entire universe was constructed upon energy exchange between photons. All particles and antiparticles were formed from photons, and their mutual annihilation resulted in yet more photons. Thus, everything occurred at the speed of light, which was infinite. Even more marvelously, because particles and antiparticles balanced each other out, the total energy level of the universe was zero. This was an incredible state of symmetry, and the foundation of the emergence of intelligence in the ten-dimensional universe.” Matter, life, sentience, civilization … in this Edenic universe, everything was part of the same whole. All matter possessed life, and all life possessed sentience, and all sentience existed in a state of harmonious civilization. Unlike the three-dimensional universe, in which lonely stars hung in the vast emptiness of space, the entire universe was a living being. All life was but a part of this one grand Life, and all intelligence but a component of the highest Intelligence. The dark forest state was an impossibility for this transcendent being of unified matter and spirit. Tianming felt awe at the root of his soul. This was the original form of the Master. The ten-dimensional universe was itself alive. Sophon offered more explanations. “The Master is not an individual like a human being; rather, it is the sum of an infinite number of self-aware consciousnesses. Every consciousness shares the awareness of every other consciousness as well as the presence of the universe itself, and yet each possesses an independent will. This is a state of existence simply unimaginable by humans: individual presence absolutely, seamlessly harmonized with the universe, akin to the geometric construction of the Spirit you saw.

There are certain women who seem to effortlessly embody what a woman is “supposed” to be. Lithe, elegant limbs. Shiny, long, perfectly tousled hair. Charming, but not overbearing or loud. Polite, soft voice. Coy, sexy, but not overt. Thin. Always thin. And you start to feel like if you don’t fit that ideal - if you age out of it or if your body puts you on the fringe of it, or your face does not have the exact symmetry - then you’ll never have the exact life you want. And then you start to accept less, because you can’t become the ideal.

It is necessary to go through life a little blunted, a little cloaked, how else to bear even a single day? The horror and the glory would overwhelm me. Papa used to talk about the story of the burning bush when God appears to Moses as a roar of fire. Moses asks to see God face to face and God tells him that to do so, even partially, even for a second, would kill him with its beauty and its power. ‘Who shall look on God and live?’ To Papa this was the central paradox of his religion, for there is no life without God and yet to approach God means death.

Of course his name would be Dominic. It meant "gift from God." AKA a life-support system for an ego. Still, that didn't mean he wasn't fun to stare at. Dominic Rossi looked like a dream, the kind of dream no woman in her right mind would want to wake from. She had always been susceptible to male beauty, ever since the age of ten, when her mother had taken her to see Michelangelo's David in Florence. She recalled staring at that huge stone behemoth, all lithe muscles and gorgeous symmetry, indifferent about his nudity, his member inspiring a dozen questions her mother brushed aside.

Galois's ideas, with all their brilliance, did not appear out of thin air. They addressed a problem whose roots could be traced all the way back to ancient Babylon. Still, the revolution that Galois had started grouped together entire domains that were previously unrelated. Much like the Cambrian explosion-that stunning burst of diversification in life forms on Earth-the abstraction of group theory opened windows into an infinity of truths. Fields as far apart as the laws of nature and music suddenly became mysteriously connected. The Tower of Babel of symmetries miraculously fused into a single language.

He’d been at college less than two months but had already stepped directly into the world he wanted, analyzing the stunning symmetry of the DNA molecule as if he’d crawled inside a glistening cathedral of coiling atoms and climbed the winding, acidic rungs of the helix. Seeing that all life depends on this precise and intricate code transcribed on fragile, organic slivers, which would perish instantly in a slightly warmer or colder world. At last, surrounded by enormous questions and people as curious as he to find the answers, drawing him toward his goal of research biologist in his own lab, interacting with other scientists

A Puritan twist in our nature makes us think that anything good for us must be twice as good if it's hard to swallow. Learning Greek and Latin used to play the role of character builder, since they were considered to be as exhausting and unrewarding as digging a trench in the morning and filling it up in the afternoon. It was what made a man, or a woman -- or more likely a robot -- of you. Now math serves that purpose in many schools: your task is to try to follow rules that make sense, perhaps, to some higher beings; and in the end to accept your failure with humbled pride. As you limp off with your aching mind and bruised soul, you know that nothing in later life will ever be as difficult. What a perverse fate for one of our kind's greatest triumphs! Think how absurd it would be were music treated this way (for math and music are both excursions into sensuous structure): suffer through playing your scales, and when you're an adult you'll never have to listen to music again. And this is mathematics we're talking about, the language in which, Galileo said, the Book of the World is written. This is mathematics, which reaches down into our deepest intuitions and outward toward the nature of the universe -- mathematics, which explains the atoms as well as the stars in their courses, and lets us see into the ways that rivers and arteries branch. For mathematics itself is the study of connections: how things ideally must and, in fact, do sort together -- beyond, around, and within us. It doesn't just help us to balance our checkbooks; it leads us to see the balances hidden in the tumble of events, and the shapes of those quiet symmetries behind the random clatter of things. At the same time, we come to savor it, like music, wholly for itself. Applied or pure, mathematics gives whoever enjoys it a matchless self-confidence, along with a sense of partaking in truths that follow neither from persuasion nor faith but stand foursquare on their own. This is why it appeals to what we will come back to again and again: our **architectural instinct** -- as deep in us as any of our urges.

Blessedness is within us all It lies upon the long scaffold Patrols the vaporous hall In our pursuits, though still, we venture forth Hoping to grasp a handful of cloud and return Unscathed, cloud in hand. We encounter Space, fist, violin, or this — an immaculate face Of a boy, somewhat wild, smiling in the sun. He raises his hand, as if in carefree salute Shading eyes that contain the thread of God. Soon they will gather power, disenchantment They will reflect enlightenment, agony They will reveal the process of love They will, in an hour alone, shed tears. His mouth a circlet, a baptismal font Opening wide as the lips of a damsel Sounding the dizzying extremes. The relativity of vein, the hip of unrest For the sake of wing there is shoulder. For symmetry there is blade. He kneels, humiliates, he pierces her side. Offering spleen to the wolves of the forest. He races across the tiles, the human board. Virility, coquetry all a game — well played. Immersed in luminous disgrace, he lifts As a slave, a nymph, a fabulous hood As a rose, a thief of life, he will parade Nude crowned with leaves, immortal. He will sing of the body, his truth He will increase the shining neck Pluck airs toward our delight Of the waning The blossoming The violent charade But who will sing of him? Who will sing of his blessedness? The blameless eye, the radiant grin For he, his own messenger, is gone He has leapt through the orphic glass To wander eternally In search of perfection His blue ankles tattooed with stars.

Perhaps the heritability of IQ implies something entirely different, something that once and for all proves that Galton’s attempt to discriminate between nature and nurture is misconceived. Consider this apparently fatuous fact. People with high IQ s, on average, have more symmetrical ears than people with low IQ s. Their whole bodies seem to be more symmetrical: foot breadth, ankle breadth, finger length, wrist breadth and elbow breadth each correlates with IQ. In the early 1990s there was revived an old interest in bodily symmetry, because of what it can reveal about the body’s development during early life. Some asymmetries in the body are consistent: the heart is on the left side of the chest, for example, in most people. But other, smaller asymmetries can go randomly in either direction. In some people the left ear is larger than the right; in others, vice versa. The magnitude of this so-called fluctuating asymmetry is a sensitive measure of how much stress the body was under when developing, stress from infections, toxins or poor nutrition. The fact that people with high IQs have more symmetrical bodies suggests that they were subject to fewer developmental stresses in the womb or in childhood. Or rather, that they were more resistant to such stresses. And the resistance may well be heritable. So the heritability of IQ might not be caused by direct ‘genes for intelligence’ at all, but by indirect genes for resistance to toxins or infections – genes in other words that work by interacting with the environment. You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.

He reached out and gently wiped away a spot of dried mud on her cheek that she hadn't known was there. "If I were as bad as you were led to believe, would I have left my bed last night so you could sleep in peace?" The light touch of his fingertips on her face now, and the memory of how she had writhed beneath his skillful caresses last night brought a scarlet blush to her cheeks. She looked away; he lowered his hand to his side. He was silent for a moment. "You are in no danger, Kate. I am not going to hurt you. I know you are afraid, but look at my actions if you doubt my words. I saved your life, didn't I? That must count for something." She looked up slowly, her gaze skimming the chiseled symmetry of his muscled abdomen and the powerful swells of his chest until she met his steady gaze. The look in his gray-blue eyes seemed sincere, and she desperately longed to believe in him. He might be her only hope.

My shaking jerked to a stop; heat flooded through me, stronger than before, but it was a new kind of heat—not a burning. It was a glowing. Everything inside me came undone as I stared at the tiny porcelain face of the half-vampire, half-human baby. All the lines that held me to my life were sliced apart in swift cuts, like clipping the strings to a bunch of balloons. Everything that made me who I was—my love for the dead girl upstairs, my love for my father, my loyalty to my new pack, the love for my other brothers, my hatred for my enemies, my home, my name, my self—disconnected from me in that second—snip, snip, snip—and floated up into space. I was not left drifting. A new string held me where I was. Not one string, but a million. Not strings, but steel cables. A million steel cables all tying me to one thing—to the very center of the universe. I could see that now—how the universe swirled around this one point. I’d never seen the symmetry of the universe before, but now it was plain.

Beauty anyhow. Not the crude beauty of the eye. It was not beauty pure and simple--Bedford Place leading into Russell Square. It was straightness and emptiness of course. the symmetry of a corridor; but it was also windows lit up, a piano, a ramophone sounding; a sense of pleasure-making hidden, but now and again emerging when, through the uncurtained window, the window left open, one saw parties sitting over tables, young people slowly circling, conversations between men and women, maids idly looking out (a strange comment theirs, when work was done), stockings drying on top ledges, a parrot, a few plants. Absorbing, mysterious, of infinite richness, this life. And in the large square where the cabs shot and swerved so quick, there were loitering couples, dallying, embracing, shrunk up under the shower of a tree that was moving; so silent, so absorbed, that one passed, discreetly, timidly, as if in the presence of some sacred ceremony to interrupt which would have been impious. That was interesting. And so on into the flare and glare.

The spirit of revolution and the power of free thought were Percy Shelley's biggest passions in life.” One could use precisely the same words to describe Galois. On one of the pages that Galois had left on his desk before leaving for that fateful duel, we find a fascinating mixture of mathematical doodles, interwoven with revolutionary ideas. After two lines of functional analysis comes the word "indivisible," which appears to apply to the mathematics. This word is followed, however, by the revolutionary slogans "unite; indivisibilite de la republic") and "Liberte, egalite, fraternite ou la mort" ("Liberty, equality, brotherhood, or death"). After these republican proclamations, as if this is all part of one continuous thought, the mathematical analysis resumes. Clearly, in Galois's mind, the concepts of unity and indivisibility applied equally well to mathematics and to the spirit of the revolution. Indeed, group theory achieved precisely that-a unity and indivisibility of the patterns underlying a wide range of seemingly unrelated disciplines.

When we have to pay a lot for something nice, we appreciate it to the full. Yet as its price in the market falls, passion has a habit of fading away. Why, then, do we associate a cheap price with lack of value? Our response is a hangover from our long preindustrial past. For most of human history, there truly was a strong correlation between cost and value: The higher the price, the better things tended to be, because there was simply no way both for prices to be low and for quality to be high. It is not that we refuse to buy inexpensive or cheap things. It's just that getting excited over cheap things has come to seem a little bizarre. How do we reverse this? The answer lies in a slightly unexpected area: the mind of a four-year-old. Children have two advantages: They don't know what they're supposed to like and they don't understand money, so price is never a guide to value for them. We buy them a costly wooden toy made by Swedish artisans who hope to teach lessons in symmetry and find that they prefer the cardboard box that it came in. If asked to put a price on things, children tend to answer by the utility and charm of an object, not its manufacturing costs. We have been looking at prices the wrong way. We have fetishised them as tokens of intrinsic value; we have allowed them to set how much excitement we are allowed to have in given areas, how much joy is to be mined in particular places. But prices were never meant to be like this: We are breathing too much life into them and thereby dulling too many of our responses to the inexpensive world. At a certain age, something very debilitating happens to children. They start to learn about "expensive" and "cheap" and absorb the view that the more expensive something is, the better it may be. They are encouraged to think well of saving up pocket money and to see the "big" toy they are given as much better than the "cheaper" one. We can't directly go backwards; we can't forget what we know of prices. However, we can pay less attention to what things cost and more to our own responses. We need to rethink our relationship to prices. The price of something is principally determined by what it cost to make, not how much human value is potentially to be derived from it.

We are all gastropods, soft, sticky creatures pulling ourselves along the earth from which we came and leaving a trail of silvery drool behind. But the snail, a worm that eternally slides along the horizon, lifts into the air, from its soft bivalve back, the geometrical wonder of its spiral shell, seemingly unrelated to the body that produced it in fear and loneliness. We secrete our shell in the sweat and mucous of our skin, in the transparent, scaly flesh of the foot we use to drag ourselves along. Through an alchemical transmutation, our drool turns to ivory and the spasms of our flesh into an undisturbed stillness. We curl around our central pilaster of rose-colored kaolin, we add, in our desperate drive to persist, spiral after spiral, each one wider, asymptotic, and translucid, until the miracle comes to pass: the revolting worm—existing in the life it lives, fermenting in its sins, irrigated by hormones and blood and sperm and lymph—rots and dies, leaving behind the ceramic filigree of its shell, a triumph of symmetry, the deathless icon in the platonic world of the mind. We all secrete, as we live, poems and pictures, ideas and hope, glistening palaces of music and faith, shells which begin by protecting our soft abdomen but after our disappearance live in the golden air of pure forms. Geometry always appears out of the amorphous, serenity out of pain and torture, just as dry tears leave behind the most wondrous crystals of salt.

MY FATHER If I have to write a poem about my father it has to be about integrity and kindness — the selfless kind of kindness that is so very rare I am sure there will be many people living somewhere who must be as kind as him but what I mean to say is I have not met one yet and when it comes to helping others he always helps too much and as the saying goes — help someone, you earn a friend. help someone too much, you make an enemy. — so you know the gist of what I’m trying to say here anyways I was talking about the poem about my father it has to be about passion and hard work because you see you cannot separate these things from him they are part of him as his two eyes and two hands and his heart and his soul and his whole being and you cannot separate wind and waves or living and the universe or earth and heavens and although he never got any award from bureaucracy the students he taught ages ago still touch his feet and some of them are the people you have to make an appointment to meet even if it is for two minutes of their time and that’s a reward for him bigger than any other that some of his colleagues got for their flattery and also I have to write about reliability as well because you see as the sun always rises and the snowflakes are always six-folds and the spring always comes and the petals of a sunflower and every flower follows the golden ratio of symmetry my father never fails to keep his promise I have to mention the rage as well that he always carries inside him like a burning fire for wrongdoings for injustice and now he carries a bitterness too for people who used him good and discarded as it always happens with every good man in our world of humans and you must be thinking he has learned his lessons well you go to him — it does not matter who you are if he knows you or you are a stranger from other side of the world — and ask for his help he will be happy to do so as you must know people never change not their soul in any case.

After the Grand Perhaps” After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorexics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has been packed with tins & other tangibles, after the barn boys have woken, startled by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part of them blithe & smooth & touchable, after the little vandals have tilted toward the impossible seduction to smash glass in the dark, getting away with the most lethal pieces, leaving the shards which travel most easily through flesh as message on the bathroom floor, the parking lots, the irresistible debris of the neighbor’s yard where he’s been constructing all winter long. After the pain has become an old known friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it. The power of fright, I think, is as much as magnetic heat or gravity. After what is boundless: wind chimes, fertile patches of the land, the ochre symmetry of fields in fall, the end of breath, the beginning of shadow, the shadow of heat as it moves the way the night heads west, I take this road to arrive at its end where the toll taker passes the night, reading. I feel the cupped heat of his left hand as he inherits change; on the road that is not his road anymore I belong to whatever it is which will happen to me. When I left this city I gave back the metallic waking in the night, the signals of barges moving coal up a slow river north, the movement of trains, each whistle like a woodwind song of another age passing, each ambulance would split a night in two, lying in bed as a little girl, a fear of being taken with the sirens as they lit the neighborhood in neon, quick as the fire as it takes fire & our house goes up in night. After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing something too sharp or fine, the word spoken out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold, the melting of the parts to want, the design of the moon to cast unfriendly light, the dazed shadow of the self as it follows the self, the toll taker’s sorrow that we couldn’t have been more intimate. Which leads me back to the land, the old wolves which used to roam on it, the one light left on the small far hill where someone must be living still. After life there must be life.

Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the labourer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it;... And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way. The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy. Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.

Hitherto I have used the words imperfect and perfect merely to distinguish between work grossly unskilful, and work executed with average precision and science; and I have been pleading that any degree of unskilfulness should be admitted, so only that the labourer’s mind had room for expression. But, accurately speaking, no good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. This for two reasons, both based on everlasting laws. The first, that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure: that is to say, his mind is always far in advance of his powers of execution, and the latter will now and then give way in trying to follow it;... And therefore, if we are to have great men working at all, or less men doing their best, the work will be imperfect, however beautiful. Of human work none but what is bad can be perfect, in its own bad way. The second reason is, that imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom—is a type of the life of this world. And in all things that live there are certain irregularities and deficiencies which are not only signs of life, but sources of beauty. No human face is exactly the same in its lines on each side, no leaf perfect in its lobes, no branch in its symmetry. All admit irregularity as they imply change; and to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy. Accept this then for a universal law, that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect; and let us be prepared for the otherwise strange fact, which we shall discern clearly as we approach the period of the Renaissance, that the first cause of the fall of the arts of Europe was a relentless requirement of perfection, incapable alike either of being silenced by veneration for greatness, or softened into forgiveness of simplicity.

Those minutes were the beginning of his abandoning himself to a very strange kind of devotion, such a reeling, intoxicated sensation that the proud and portentous word ‘love’ is not quite right for it. It was that faithful, dog-like devotion without desire that those in mid-life seldom feel, and is known only to the very young and the very old. A love devoid of any deliberation, not thinking but only dreaming. He entirely forgot the unjust yet ineradicable disdain that even the clever and considerate show to those who wear a waiter’s tailcoat, he did not look for opportunities and chance meetings, but nurtured this strange affection in his blood until its secret fervour was beyond all mockery and criticism. His love was not a matter of secret winks and lurking glances, the sudden boldness of audacious gestures, the senseless ardour of salivating lips and trembling hands; it was quiet toil, the performance of those small services that are all the more sacred and sublime in their humility because they are intended to go unnoticed. After the evening meal he smoothed out the crumpled folds of the tablecloth where she had been sitting with tender, caressing fingers, as one would stroke a beloved woman’s soft hands at rest; he adjusted everything close to her with devout symmetry, as if he were preparing it for a special occasion. He carefully carried the glasses that her lips had touched up to his own small, musty attic bedroom, and watched them sparkle like precious jewellery by night when the moonlight streamed in. He was always to be found in some corner, secretly attentive to her as she strolled and walked about. He drank in what she said as you might relish a sweet, fragrantly intoxicating wine on the tongue, and responded to every one of her words and orders as eagerly as children run to catch a ball flying through the air. So his intoxicated soul brought an ever-changing , rich glow into his dull, ordinary life. The wise folly of clothing the whole experience in the cold, destructive words of reality was an idea that never entered his mind: the poor waiter François was in love with an exotic Baroness who would be for ever unattainable. For he did not think of her as reality, but as something very distant, very high above him, sufficient in its mere reflection of life. He loved the imperious pride of her orders, the commanding arch of her black eyebrows that almost touched one another, the wilful lines around her small mouth, the confident grace of her bearing. Subservience seemed to him quite natural, and he felt the humiliating intimacy of menial labour as good fortune, because it enabled him to step so often into the magic circle that surrounded her.

His system of equations worked with jewelled precision. Its construction had been an immense feat of sustained creative effort in three stages spread over 9 years. The whole route was paved with inspired innovations but from a historical perspective one crucial step stands out-the idea that electric currents exist in empty space. It is these displacement currents that give the equations their symmetry and make the waves possible. Without them the term @E/@t in equation (4) becomes zero and the whole edifice crumbles.

But gradually through the tumultuous talk of the days and the nightlong wonderings when I sat groping for hope through the darkness, there began to form in me one deep belief, that if there were no God there was no meaning in life. Like a child with a foot rule trying to measure a mountain, I demanded of this Mystery what its attributes were, asking assurance, trying to frame a pattern for the Ultimate. Every time I turned back baffled from that hidden face I was brought up again by the beautiful symmetry of the world or by the strangeness of some everyday organism. The delicate beauty of leaves and of bare branches, the perfection with which the tiniest creatures were designed, the constant recurrence of the seasons were phenomena which tugged at my senses, saying, “Somewhere there is a Cause for us.” I grew thin with tension, straining beyond my strength. The more I tried to probe this Mystery the greater it became; the closer I attempted to approach Him to test Him the vaster and more impenetrable He appeared, until I saw I had no measure huge enough to encompass Him and began to sense why faith must accept Him without questioning.

Through the trees there was a motion, a person walking on the road. Isabelle watched as the girl - it was Amy - moving slowly and with her head down, came up the gravel driveway. The sight of her pained Isabelle. It pained her terribly to see her, but why? Because she looked unhappy, her shoulders slumped like that, her neck thrust forward, walking slowly, just about dragging her feet. This was Isabelle's daughter; this was Isabelle's fault. She hadn't done it right, being a mother, and this youthful desolation walking up the driveway was exactly proof of that. But then Amy straightened up, glancing toward the house with a wary squint, and she seemed transformed to Isabelle, suddenly a presence to be reckoned with. Her limbs were long and even, her breasts beneath her T-shirt seemed round and right, neither large or small, only part of some pleasing symmetry; her face looked intelligent and shrewd. Isabelle, sitting motionless in her chair, felt intimidated. And angry. The anger arrived in one quick thrust. It was the sight of her daughter's body that angered her. It was not the girl's unpleasantness, or even the fact that she had been lying to Isabelle for so many months, nor did Isabelle hate Amy for taken up all the space in her life. She hated Amy because the girl had been enjoying the sexual pleasures of a man, while she herself had not.

Complexity is a delicate business. Chemical and molecular bonds require a particular range of temperature in which to operate. Liquid water exists over a mere one hundred degree range on the centigrade scale. Even Earth-based life is concentrated towards particular climatic zones. The temperature at the Earth's surface keeps it tantalizingly balanced between recurrent ice ages and the roasting that results from a runaway greenhouse effect. Very slight differences in the size of our planet or its distance from the Sun would have tipped the scales irretrievably towards one or other of these fates. That such a delicate balance, which is essentially the outcome of those random symmetry-breakings that we discussed in Chapter 6, should be so crucial suggests that natural complexity may be a rather rare thing in the Universe.

I, Zane Hunter, promise to stand by your side and sleep in your arms. I will risk my life for yours. I will die for you. There are only so many ways I can tell you how much I love you, but I vow to show you every day. We shall bear together whatever trouble and sorrow may lie upon us. You will never be alone. Even in death, our souls will find each other. I let you go once; I won’t do it again, Piper. I can’t lose you. Never.” His accent came across, punctuating his words, heavy and lyrical. It was beautiful. He was beautiful. “I marry you and bind my life and soul to yours.

Her life had a fearful symmetry at times. Fierce was its construction, and within its color and contour lay all the calamity of madness. Violence crept in with stillness or exploded with all the ferocity of youth. But in the calm silence that stretched between one kill and the next, her mind turned anew. No matter how disciplined she was, another daring plot was never far behind.

The truly blessed among us are not those with perfect symmetry; they are those whose past affords them the luxury not to care too much what the mirror happens to say.

THE work of deciding cases goes on every day in hundreds of courts throughout the land. Any judge, one might suppose, would find it easy to describe the process which he had followed a thousand times and more. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Let some intelligent layman ask him to explain:  he will not go very far before taking refuge in the excuse that the language of craftsmen is unintelligible to those untutored in the craft. Such an excuse may cover with a semblance of respectability an otherwise ignominious retreat. It will hardly serve to still the pricks of curiosity and conscience. In moments of introspection, when there {10} is no longer a necessity of putting off with a show of wisdom the uninitiated interlocutor, the troublesome problem will recur, and press for a solution. What is it that I do when I decide a case? To what sources of information do I appeal for guidance? In what proportions do I permit them to contribute to the result? In what proportions ought they to contribute? If a precedent is applicable, when do I refuse to follow it? If no precedent is applicable, how do I reach the rule that will make a precedent for the future? If I am seeking logical consistency, the symmetry of the legal structure, how far shall I seek it? At what point shall the quest be halted by some discrepant custom, by some consideration of the social welfare, by my own or the common standards of justice and morals? Into that strange compound which is brewed daily in the caldron of the courts, all these ingredients enter in varying proportions. I am not concerned to inquire whether judges ought to be allowed to brew such a compound at all. I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life. There, before us, {11} is the brew. Not a judge on the bench but has had a hand in the making.

Blinding, joyous, fearful symmetry surrounds me. So much is incorporated within patterns now that the entire universe verges on resolving itself into a picture. I’m closing in on the ultimate gestalt: the context in which all knowledge fits and is illuminated, a mandala, the music of the spheres, kosmos.

January 8 Look with intensity ...It seems to me that learning is astonishingly difficult, as is listening also. We never actually listen to anything because our mind is not free; our ears are stuffed up with those things that we already know, so listening becomes extraordinarily difficult. I think—or rather, it is a fact—that if one can listen to something with all of one’s being, with vigor, with vitality, then the very act of listening is a liberative factor, but unfortunately you never do listen, as you have never learned about it. After all, you only learn when you give your whole being to something. When you give your whole being to mathematics, you learn; but when you are in a state of contradiction, when you do not want to learn but are forced to learn, then it becomes merely a process of accumulation. To learn is like reading a novel with innumerable characters; it requires your full attention, not contradictory attention. If you want to learn about a leaf—a leaf of the spring or a leaf of the summer—you must really look at it, see the symmetry of it, the texture of it, the quality of the living leaf. There is beauty, there is vigor, there is vitality in a single leaf. So to learn about the leaf, the flower, the cloud, the sunset, or a human being, you must look with all intensity.

Your first number reveals your overall personality; what you tend to think about as you go through your day; what you value; your patterns of perception; and your needs in terms of lifestyle, relationships, and life in general.

If you believe in yourself and you don’t give-up, the fullness of life’s balancing grace will demand the symmetry of recompense for all your loss and pain.

Did you hear it? Can you picture the symmetry? Our God is a God of hospitality, creating a place for a people, a place where all life can flourish. God provides for all creation, as our Story shows. Our God is a God of order; we can trust God to provide for us now as in the beginning. “I know that it may not seem that way today, for here we are, exiles in a foreign land. Life is hard. We know that. And that is why we must tell each other the Story, and keep telling it, to do exactly what God has continually told us to do: remember . . . remember . . . remember.”[5]

There's plenty of symmetry in revenge, but no virtue.

If I've learned anything in Kabul, it is that human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries. But I find comfort in it, in the idea of a pattern, of a narrative of my life taking shape, like a photograph in a darkroom, a story that slowly emerges and affirms the good I have always wanted to see in myself. It sustains me, this story.

In fact, Einstein proceeded to turn the argument around, by showing that one could derive the complete system of four Maxwell equations from one of them, by making Galilean transformations to recover the general case. (By putting charge in motion, you get currents, and by putting electric fields in motion, you get magnetic fields. Thus the law governing how unmoving electric charges generate electric fields, after Galilean transformations, gives the general case.) That profound trick was a taste of the future. Symmetry, rather than a deduction from given laws, became a primary principle, with a life of its own. One can constrain the laws by requiring them to have symmetry.

Dandy, I thought. When it gets too hot, the earth freezes over. Makes sense, though. A perfect incongruous symmetry. If life is filled with ironies, why shouldn’t nature be? Hard work leads to coronaries, love to heartbreak of another kind, life to death. As night follows day, sorrow follows joy. The affluent, many of whom labored mightily to get there, spawn indolent children. The kid from the ghetto gets an Ivy League scholarship, then is cut down in a gang fight at home. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the meek shall inherit the shit.

It struck him that there is a beautiful symmetry to life.

Your third number shows how you come across when you first meet someone, and it also reveals how you do your work in the world—as well as how you do anything, really.

yesterday, the woman communicated the lie to the man; today, Mary must proclaim the Risen Lord to men. And, by symmetry, whereas the forbidden fruit could be touched but not eaten, Jesus, who is also the living Bread (Jn 6:51), must not be touched but may be eaten. The one who says Do not touch me is in fact the same one who said a few verses earlier: Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you (Jn 6:53).

I think you’ve taught him his lesson, Oren.” The young lady pushed the barrel away from Connell’s face. “I don’t think he’ll manhandle me again.” When she gave him a “so-there” look and then raised her chin, a spark of self-pride flamed to life in his gut. His mam had always made sure he knew how to treat a girl, but this was obviously no ordinary girl. “If anyone was doing the manhandling, it was you.” Connell rubbed the sore spot on his forehead. “I didn’t ask you to sit on my lap.” Her eyes widened, revealing a woodsy brown that was as dark and rich as fine-grained walnut. The color matched the thick curls that had come loose from the knitted hat covering her head. Oren stood back, tucked his gun under his arm, and tapped his black derby up. His eyebrows followed suit. The girl opened her mouth to speak but then clamped it shut, apparently at a loss for words. A wisp of satisfaction curled through Connell. After the way she’d let the old man humiliate him, he didn’t mind letting her squirm for a minute. But only for a minute. Mam’s training was ingrained too deeply to wish the girl ill will for more than that. He shoved himself out of the chair and straightened his aching back. “Look,” he said, plucking a last dirty sock from his shoulder. “Can we start over? I’m Connell McCormick.” She hesitated and then tilted her head at him. “And I’m Miss Young.” “I sure hope you’ll forgive me if I’ve caused you any . . . discomfort.” Surprise flitted across her elegant, doelike features. “Well now. With that polite apology, how could I refuse to forgive you?” He gave her a smile and waited. The polite thing for her to do was offer her own apology and perhaps even a thank-you for his attempts to save her from Jimmy Neil. But she only returned the smile, one that curved her lovely full lips in perfect symmetry but didn’t make it into the depths of her eyes.