?Why, you keep thinking of our present earth! But our present earth may have been repeated a billion times. Why, it's become extinct, been frozen; cracked, broken to bits, disintegrated into its elements, again ?the water above the firmament, ? then again a comet, again a sun, again from the sun it becomes earth?and the same sequence may have been repeated endlessly and exactly the same to every detail.? ? The Devil, in conversation with Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Constance Garnett