Beth's Mother : He's always been like a brother to me
Beth : Only because there was no chance of him being anything else
Beth's Mother : Take no notice of us. We're like two bitter old spinsters.
Beth : Thank you, mother, for tarring me with the same brush.
Martin : I'd rather make mistakes than do nothing. I'd rather mess up than miss out completely.
Arthur Seldom : Because "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent.
Arthur Seldom : we find ourselves faced with a fresh, rousing defence of mathematics, as if numbers were pre-existing ideas in reality.
Arthur Seldom : If I write 2 then 4 then 6, ......
then we feel good, because we know that next comes 8. We can foresee it, we are not in the hands of destiny. Unfortunately, however, this has nothing to do with truth.
Arthur Seldom : Try to etch on your memory everything you can see. This moment is crucial.
Arthur Seldom : In general, the patterns followed by a serial killer are crude, monotonous and repetitive, cases that can be analyzed psychologically, not logically.
Arthur Seldom : Oh, a circle's a good way to start a logical series. There's no symbol more indeterminate. Could mean almost anything.
Martin : But you looked after her for years. Seldom told me.
Beth : Five years... Five years of waiting for her to drop dead. Forgive me for being so cruelly sincere, but if anyone wanted this to end, it was me.
Arthur Seldom : there is a gulf between what is true and what is provable. We can never be sure of all the facts about a phenomenon, and to lack just one, could change everything.
Martin : Thanks to that poor woman's death, I've just had lunch with Arthur Seldom.
Arthur Seldom : The answers that he had considered absurd were, in fact,
another possible solution and perfectly valid to continue the series, only with an infinitely more complex justification.
Arthur Seldom : Wittgenstein's paradox concerning finite rules.
The series 2, 4, 8, could obviously be followed by 16, but also by 10 or 7004.
It's always possible to find a rule, a justification which allows a series to be continued by any number. It all depends on how complicated the rule is.
Arthur Seldom : but he couldn't understand it. The problem was his own brain.
Arthur Seldom : Any formulation is valid in the series, because we can always find
a rule that justifies it.
Arthur Seldom : A murder that wouldn't have been discovered had it not been for the note. Another imperceptible crime.
Arthur Seldom : In the real world any decision, however insignificant, has irreversible consequences.
Arthur Seldom : His conclusion was that the only perfect crime that exists
is not the one that remains unsolved but the one which is solved with the wrong culprit.
Arthur Seldom : His conclusion was that the only perfect crime that exists
is not the one that remains unsolved but the one which is solved with the wrong culprit.
We are mediocre, and all mediocre people can do is... get drunk and forget.
Martin : Now I understand why girls go out with musicians and not mathematicians.
Arthur Seldom : This is the largest collection of fakes in the world. I feel at ease here. In effect, Martin, this is the place that contains the most truth in the entire planet.
We have an absolute truth ... everything is fake.
Martin: Numbers also lie. The truth is not mathematical, as I once believed. It's absurd, confused, random, disorderly, and deeply unpleasant.
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