"The crickets and the rust-beetles scuttled among the nettles of the sage thicket. "Vámonos, amigos," he whispered, and threw the busted leather flintcraw over the loose weave of the saddlecock. And they rode on in the friscalating dusklight."

"Wildcat was written in a kind of obsolete vernacular. Wildcat...pkow. Okay, I'm gonna go."

"Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?"

"Why would a review make the point of saying someone's not a genius? You think I'm especially not a genius? [Pause] You didn't even have to think about it, did you?"

"Let's shag ass."

"He looks pretty good for a suicide. Attempted, anyway."

"I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield. I'm talking about taking it out and chopping it up."

"Anybody interested in grabbing a couple of burgers and hitting the cemetery?"

"Hell of a damn grave. Wish it were mine."

"Once this baby starts kicking, it ain't gonna stop. So nobody get cute! [While carrying an automatic, high-powered shotgun to hold the villains at bay]"

"You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers. A movie, by the way, was made — sort of a small-scale offbeat movie — called Pi recently. I think it starts off with a big string of digits running across the screen, and then there are people who get concerned with various things, and in the end this Bible code idea comes up. And that ties in with numbers, so the relation to numbers is not necessarily scientific, and even when I was mentally disturbed, I had a lot of interest in numbers."

"Stephen Pearlman - Rabbi Cohen"

"Pamela Hart - Marcy Dawson"

"Ben Shenkman - Lenny Meyer"

"Mark Margolis - Sol Robeson"

"Sean Gullette - Maximillian Cohen"

"It's survival of the fittest, Max, and we've got the fucking gun."

"The Torah is just a long string of numbers. Some say that it's a code sent to us from God."

"Each letter's a number. Like the Hebrew A, Alef is 1. B, Bet is 2. You understand? But look at this. The numbers are inter-related. Like take the Hebrew word for father, 'Ab' - Alef Bet... 1, 2 equals 3. Alright? Hebrew word for mother, 'em' — Alef Mem... 1, 40 equals 41. Sum of 3 and 41... 44. Alright? Now, Hebrew word for child, alright, mother... father... child, 'Yeled' — that's 10, 30, and 4... 44."

"As soon as you discard scientific rigor, you're no longer a mathematician, you're a numerologist."

"That is the truth of our world, Max. It can't be easily summed up with math."

"The Ancient Japanese considered the Go board to be a microcosm of the universe. Although when it is empty it appears to be simple and ordered, in fact, the possibilities of gameplay are endless. They say that no two Go games have ever been alike. Just like snowflakes. So, the Go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe."

"Hold on. You have to slow down. You're losing it. You have to take a breath. Listen to yourself. You're connecting a computer bug I had with a computer bug you might have had and some religious hogwash. You want to find the number 216 in the world, you will be able to find it everywhere. 216 steps from a mere street corner to your front door. 216 seconds you spend riding on the elevator. When your mind becomes obsessed with anything, you will filter everything else out and find that thing everywhere."

"Number? How many digits was it? 100? 1,000? 216?"

"Have you met Archimedes? The one with the black spots, you see? You remember Archimedes of Syracuse, eh? The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks — insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife — she's forced to share a bed with this genius — convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density — weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery."

"There will be no order, only chaos."

"It's just a number. I'm sure you've written down every 216 digit number. You've translated all of them. You've intoned them all. Haven't you? What's it gotten you? The number is nothing! It's the meaning. It's the syntax. It's what's between the numbers. You haven't understood it. It's because it's not for you!"

"If the number's there I'll find it!"

"My new hypothesis: If we're built from Spirals while living in a giant Spiral, then is it possible that everything we put our hands to is infused with the Spiral?"

"10:15, personal note: It's fair to say I'm stepping out on a limb, but I am on the edge and that's where it happens."

"Failed treatments to date: Beta blockers, calcium channel blockers, adrenalin injections, high dose ibuprofen, steroids, Trager Mentastics, violent exercise, cafergot suppositories, caffeine, acupuncture, marijuana, Percodan, Midrine, Tenormin, Sansert, homeopathics. No results. No results..."

"12:50, press return..."

"I'm trying to understand our world. I don't deal with petty materialists like you."

"9:13, Personal note: When I was a little kid my mother told me not to stare into the sun. So once when I was six, I did. At first the brightness was overwhelming, but I had seen that before. I kept looking, forcing myself not to blink, and then the brightness began to dissolve. My pupils shrunk to pinholes and everything came into focus and for a moment I understood. The doctors didn't know if my eyes would ever heal. I was terrified, alone in that darkness. Slowly daylight crept in through the bandages, and I could see, but something else had changed inside of me. That day I had my first headache."

"12:45, Restate my assumptions: 1. Mathematics is the language of nature. 2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers. 3. If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature. Evidence: The cycling of disease epidemics; the wax and wane of caribou populations; sun spot cycles; the rise and fall of the Nile. So, what about the stock market? The universe of numbers that represents the global economy. Millions of human hands at work, billions of minds. A vast network, screaming with life. An organism. A natural organism. My hypothesis: Within the stock market, there is a pattern as well. Right in front of me. Hiding behind the numbers. Always has been."

"You see the simplicity of the circle. You see the maddening complexity of the endless string of numbers, 3.14 off into infinity."

"Something's going on. It has to do with that number. There's an answer in that number."

"I've often seen these people, these squares at the table, short stack and long odds against them. All their outs gone. One last card in the deck that can help them. I used to wonder how they could let themselves get into such bad shape, and how the hell they thought they could turn it around."

"Josh Mostel - Zagosh"

"Melina Kanakaredes - Barbara"

"Paul Sorvino - Russian Thug"

"Listen, here's the thing. If you can't spot the sucker in your first half-hour at the table, then you are the sucker. Guys around here will tell ya, you play for a living, it's like any other job. You don't gamble, you grind it out. Your goal is to win one big bet an hour, that's it. Get your money in when you have the best of it. Protect it when you don't. Don't give anything away. That's how I paid my way through half of law school. A true grinder. You see, I learned how to win a little at a time. But finally I've learned this: if you're too careful, your whole life can become a fuckin' grind."

"Gretchen Mol - Jo"