Often compound words have drifted so far from their etymological roots that native speakers can easily miss what is right in front of their eyes. - Douglas Hofstadter

The theorem can be likened to a pearl, and the method of proof to an oyster. The pearl is prized for its luster and simplicity; the oyster is a complex living beast whose innards give rise to this mysteriously simple gem.

"One of the greatest problems for systems programmers (the people who write compilers, interpreters, assemblers, and other programs to be used by many people) is to figure out how to write error-detecting routines in such a way that the messages which they feed to the user whose program has a "bug" provide high-level, rather than low-level, descriptions of the problem. it is an interesting reversal that when something goes wrong in a genetic "program" (e.g., a mutation), the "bug" is manifest only to people on a high level - namely on the phenotype level, not the genotype level. Actually, modern biology uses mutations as one of its principal windows onto genetic processes, because of their multilevel traceability."

The repetition of the orphanage drama year after year, echoing the Nietzschean idea of eternal recurrence — that everything that has happened will happen again and again — seems to rob the little world of any real meaning. Why should the repetition of the fire inspector's lament make it sound so hollow?