Alas, despite wing implants, feathers and wax, and carnal associations with swans, we will never grow wings. Alas, any true flight we make will alway… - Peter Greenaway

The major sweep of this book's living is too often marred by qualifying. It is hedged about with ifs and buts and if onlys and howevers, excuses for a life that is about to shut its covers for the last time and then crumple into dust in an unseen and never-to-be-remembered library.

Counting is the most simple and primitive of narratives -- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 -- a tale with a beginning, a middle and an end and a sense of progression -- arriving at a finish of two digits -- a goal attained, a dénouement reached.

Jean Renoir once suggested that most true creators have only one idea and spend their lives reworking it, but then very rapidly he added that most people don't have any ideas at all, so one idea is pretty amazing.