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Quote by Richard Brautigan

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The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western

This book is a unique exploration of the Gothic Western genre, combining the dark and mysterious atmosphere of Gothic literature with the rugged and adventurous spirit of the Western frontier. more

Author

Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan

Richard Brautigan was an influential American novelist born on January 30, 1935, and died on September 14, 1984. Known for his unique literary style and profound depiction of the natural environment, he is considered one of the key figures of the Beat Generation and the Post-Beat Generation. more

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“The man who has learned that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... If three plus one can be two, or fourteen, then reason is madness.”

“And so matching by itself is incapable of creating an art of reckoning. Without our ability to arrange things in ordered succession little progress could have been made. Correspondence and succession, the two principles that permeate all mathematics - nay, all realms of exact thought - are woven into the very fabric of our number system.”

“The page of my notebook was filled with many messy integrals, but all of a sudden I saw emerge a formula for counting. I had begun to calculate a quantity on the assumption that the result was a real number, but found instead that, in certain units, all the possible answers would be integers. This meant that areas and volumes cannot take any value, but come in multiples of fixed units.”