The paper "Division by three" by Peter Doyle and John Conway has a wealth of colorful language including:
"If the arrows are good, straight, American arrows, it is very natural for each arrow to dream of marrying the arrow next door."
and
"Not that we believe there really are any such things as infinite sets, or that the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms for set theory are necessarily even consistent. Indeed, we’re somewhat doubtful whether large natural numbers (like $80^{5000}$ , or even $2^{200}$) exist in any very real sense, and we’re secretly hoping that Nelson will succeed in his program for proving that the usual axioms of arithmetic—and hence also of set theory—are inconsistent. (See Nelson [6].) All the more reason, then, for us to stick with methods which, because of their concrete, combinatorial nature, are likely to survive the possible collapse of set theory as we know it today."
