yuyin

“Afterward she lies nestled against me, her hair tickling my face. I stroke her lightly, memorizing her body. I want her to melt into me, like butter on toast. I want to absorb her and walk around for the rest of my days with her encased in my skin.”
― Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

“The axiom of equality states that x always equals x: it assumes that if you have a conceptual thing named x, that it must always be equivalent to itself, that it has a uniqueness about it, that it is in possession of something so irreducible that we must assume it is absolutely, unchangeably equivalent to itself for all time, that its very elementalness can never be altered. But it is impossible to prove. Always, absolutes, nevers: these are words, as much as numbers, that make up the world of mathematics. Not everyone liked the axiom of equality - Dr. Li had once called it coy and twee, a fan dance of an axiom - but he had always appreciated how elusive it was, how the beauty of the equation itself would always be frustrated by the attempts to prove it. It was the kind of axiom that could drive you mad, that could consume you, that could easily become an entire life.”
― Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

“Zero has had a long history. The Babylonians invented the concept of zero; the ancient Greeks debated it in lofty terms (how could something be nothing?); the ancient Indian scholar Pingala paired Zero with the numeral 1 to get double digits; and both the Mayans and the Romans made Zero a part of their numeral systems. But Zero finally found its place around AD 498, when the Indian astronomer Aryabhatta sat up in bed one morning and exclaimed, "Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam" — which translates, roughly as, "place to place in ten times in value". With that, the idea of decimal based place value notion was born. Now Zero was on a roll: It spread to the Arab world, where it flourished; crossed the Iberian Peninsula to Europe (thanks to the Spanish Moors); got some tweaking from the Italians; and eventually sailed the Atlantic to the New World, where zero ultimately found plenty of employment (together with the digit 1) in a place called Silicon Valley.”
― Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

“He'd been thinking about the quality of sunshine, that is, how daylight wipes away the stars and the planets, making them invisible to human eyes. If one needed the darkness in order to see the heavens, might daylight be a form of blindness? Could it be that sound was also a form of deafness? If so, what was silence?”
― Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing