Rivka Galchen Quotes & Sayings

But one day I woke up and heard myself saying, I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can't help people eat cereal any longer. — Rivka Galchen

I've always thought of my own mind as an unruly parliament, with a feeble leader, with crazy extremist factions. — Rivka Galchen

I don't know if math is real in the sense that it's woven into the fabric of the cosmos, or if it's something that we invent and impose upon it. I don't know. — Rivka Galchen

The room was too much there. I could feel the color of the wallpaper
burgundy
invading. — Rivka Galchen

The magnificently humble. The enormously small. The meaningfully ridiculous. Robert Walser's work often reads like a dazzling answer to the question, How immense can modesty be? — Rivka Galchen

He was my first love, my first love in the way that first loves are usually second or third or fourth loves. I still think about a stranger in a green jacket across from me in the waiting room at the DMV. About a blue-eyed man with a singed earlobe that I saw at a Baskin-Robbins with his daughter. My first that kind of love. I never got over him. I never get over anyone. — Rivka Galchen

If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a "madman" to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the "author" might be reality and the "madman" just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination. — Rivka Galchen

I should at least have learned more about how it had come to be that Rema had abandoned her mother, before I asked her to marry - and hopefully not abandon - me. But I saw Rema all prismatically, all fractured and reconstituted as if seen in the valley of an unshined silver spoon and actually I'm glad love does that, I shouldn't complain about love or love's perspective - distorted or no, to feel superior to it would be wrong, as if there were some better way of seeing. — Rivka Galchen

The most important work that I've done in my life - not all of it, but most of it - was unexpected to me. I was working on a different problem and doing some calculation when I noticed something. Then you follow up that thing that you notice and it takes you to the result that was not what you were shooting for. — Rivka Galchen

Even the most normal person, if placed in a highly abnormal situation, can be mistakenly perceived as the source of abnormality of the person/circumstance aggregate — Rivka Galchen

That's something that would really sell. I mean, I admire that you tell stories of make-believe people in worlds that don't exist and that have no relevance to how we live. That can be nice, but people also like things that are uplifting and practical.
(From the short story: The Late Novels of Gene Hackman) — Rivka Galchen

I wonder if I talk like a dead man. My daughter once came home from school very excited about some lecture -this was years ago, before I died, though just right before- and she said her English teacher had talked about what the dead sound like in Dante. This funny thing about Dante's dead, which is that they know the past, and even the future, but they don't know the present. About the present they have all these questions for Dante. And that somehow is what being alive is, to be suspended in the time. She seemed to feel that really meant something. That and also that the dead know themselves better than the living do. — Rivka Galchen

I'm interested in [meteorology], but I'm more interested in gross misappropriations of the authoritative language of science. It feels rife with clarity, and yet you don't understand what it means. And I think that's beautiful. — Rivka Galchen

To date, most things that I've seen use the internet as a delivery vehicle for old style teaching. We're taking steps in the direction - it'll be a long, iterative process - to create new kinds of educational experiences by using this new tool of the internet. — Rivka Galchen

Often times in physics we want to talk about empty space as a first step toward nothingness, but nothingness is far more profound than empty space. Nothingness is the absence of everything including space itself. — Rivka Galchen

I'd consider it profession enough to have streaky bleached hair, to wear a green scarf, to spill spicy teas, to walk (slightly) unevenly on high heels. What more is there to give to the world than that? I realize this sentiment of mine is currently considered appalling, but these days I find the popularity of ideas even more meaningless than ever before. — Rivka Galchen

He is my unicorn, though ... That's how I felt falling in love with him, as if I'd found a creature of myth. — Rivka Galchen

No authority is wholly natural or native; when we're not borrowing from our neighbors, we're borrowing from our ancestors. One reason art tends to come from looking outward and not just inward is that we're always speaking from a shaky authority, even when narrating our own experiences - maybe especially when narrating just ourselves. — Rivka Galchen

You'll never get over Ilan. And that will one day horrify you. But soon enough you'll settle on a replacement object for all that love of yours, which does you about as much good as a life jacket in a train wreck. — Rivka Galchen

It's true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good. — Rivka Galchen

I had considered envying men before
I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania
but I don't really envy those things, and I'm not sure I even believe in them
but this, the covert-baby-having thing, was the first real thing. — Rivka Galchen

My books rustled by like a military of ducks. My mother had never liked my books. She'd said they kept me from real life, by which I think she meant men, or money, or both. Always accusing things of precisely the crimes they hadn't committed.
(From the short story: Once an Empire) — Rivka Galchen

The writing process for a short story feels more like field geology, where you keep turning the thing over and over, noting its qualities in detail, hammering at it, putting it near flame, pouring different acids on it, and then finally you figure out what it is, or you just give up and mount it on a ring and have an awkward chunky piece of jewelry that seems weirdly dominating but that you for some reason like. I could be wrong about field geology here. — Rivka Galchen

I barely even know how I didn't feel. I didn't feel like reading a newspaper, or having a coffee, or going for a jog, or watching television. Nor did I feel like crying behind the boiler in the basement. Or like trying out for something. I did't even feel like I had lost someone I deeply loved; this was different from that. I didn't feel like going to another movie and asking for extra butter on my popcorn. I didn't feel like talking to someone who would understand. — Rivka Galchen

Now it seems there are many more varieties of 'normal' family. — Rivka Galchen

It's important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept their daily news, and I think, in something as insignificantly devastating as appearance, denial is more socially constructive than despondency. Not that there's anything especially wrong with me
just the usual. — Rivka Galchen

I had also once come across a phrase about a book "lying like a poleaxed wildebeest in the middle of my life." It was my life that was lying in the middle of my life like that, like a poleaxed wildebeest. — Rivka Galchen

Up until I was about thirty, I had a strong preference for men over women. I mean specifically as friends, as people to talk to. If a male and a female exactly alike were to enter a room, in my deformed perceptions the male was magnified into glory. It wasn't until this primitive preference began to expire, for whatever reasons, that it began to bother me that it had previously existed. — Rivka Galchen

During the 1919 solar eclipse, people go out to measure the positions of the stars and they find exactly what Einstein predicted. Einstein gets a telegram saying this, and somebody asked him, Professor Einstein, what would you have said if the observations didn't agree with what your prediction of general relativity said should be happening? And Einstein said, "I'd be sorry for the dear lord; the theory is correct." What he meant by that is the math is just so elegant, so beautiful, so powerful, that almost seemingly it can't possibly be wrong. — Rivka Galchen

I'm not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding. But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be. — Rivka Galchen

Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true. — Rivka Galchen