James Kaimakamis

“I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The Maniac

“They had already put together an entire committee to choose the best targets, but it was actually von Neumann who convinced them that they shouldn’t detonate the devices at ground level, but higher up in the atmosphere, since that way the blast wave would cause incomparably larger damage. He even calculated the optimal height himself—six hundred meters, about two thousand feet. And that is exactly how high our bombs were when they exploded above the roofs of those quaint wooden houses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“He once told me that, just as wild animals play when they are young in preparation for lethal circumstances arising later in their lives, mathematics may be, to a large extent, nothing but a strange and wonderful collection of games, an enterprise whose real purpose, beyond any one stated outright, is to slowly work changes in the individual and collective human psyche, as a way to prepare us for a future that nobody can imagine.”
― Benjamín Labatut, The MANIAC

“...what's beautiful in life turns out bad in a painting because it's like there's too much beauty, a good picture needs something bad in it in order to shine the way it should, it needs darkness in it...”
― Jon Fosse