Lauren Smith

“‎Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.”
― Voltaire

“The role of the artist is exactly the same as the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see.”
― James Baldwin

“I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“That Russia produced some of the twentieth century's greatest mathematicians is, plainly, a miracle. Mathematics was antithetical to the Soviet way of everything. It promoted argument; it studied patterns in a country that controlled its citizens by forcing them to inhabit a shifting, unpredictable reality; it placed a premium on logic and consistency in a culture that thrived on rhetoric and fear; it required highly specialized knowledge to understand, making the mathematical conversation a code that was indecipherable to an outsider; and worst of all, mathematics laid claim to singular and knowable truths when the regime had staked its legitimacy on its own singular truth. All of this made mathematics in the Soviet Union uniquely appealing to those whose minds demanded consistency and logic, unattainable in virtually any other area of study.”
― Masha Gessen, Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the Mathematical Breakthrough of the Century