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“It is a plan that will bring all ten of us wealth, and then freedom, though possibly not in that order.”
“The workings of the market dictate that tutsaklar who are likely to be ransomed, and for large fees, are well-treated—”
“I am a crypto-Jew,” Moseh said. “In fact, more Crypto than Jew.
“My name is Excellentissimo Domino Jeronimo Alejandro Peñasco de Halcones Quinto, Marchioni de Azuaga et de Hornachos, Comiti de Llerena, Barcarrota, et de Jerez de los Caballeros, Vicecomiti de Llera, Entrín Alto y Bajo, et de Cabeza del Buey, Baroni de Barrax, Baza, Nerva, Jadraque, Brazatortas, Gargantiel, et de Val de las Muertas, Domino Domus de Atalaya, Ordinis Equestris Calatravae Beneficiario de la Fresneda.
All of the land is owned by the Church and so it is, perforce, a most pious city, in that there is no place to live unless one joins a holy order.
The Commerce of the World, especially as it is now carried on, is an unbounded Ocean of Business; Trackless and unknown, like the Seas it is managed upon; the Merchant is no more to be follow’d in his Adventures, than a Maze or Labyrinth is to be trac’d out without a Clue.
“As we grow older the number of bundles waxes,” she added, “and we must all become jugglers.”
Oh, well (she thought), if the world were populated solely by persons who loved and desired each other symmetrically, it might be happier, but not so interesting.
“Now as you may know, Bon-bon, every pirate and privateer has lurking within him the soul of an accountant. Though some would say ’tis the other way round.
That is why the English euphemism for going a-pirating is going on the account.
In a world full of men who only wanted to take her to bed, it was somehow comforting to know that there was one who, given the opportunity, would prefer to read through a big pile of stolen correspondence.
“If the customs of the nobility made sense, anyone could figure them out, and become noble. But because they are incoherent and meaningless, not to mention ever-changing, the only way to know them is to be inculcated with them, to absorb them through the skin. This makes them a coin that is almost impossible to counterfeit.”
Jacob liked this
Gold is gold everywhere, fungible and indifferent. But when a disk of gold is stamped by a coiner with certain pompous words and the picture of a King, it takes on added value—seigneurage. It has that value only in that people believe that it does—it is a shared phant’sy.
She knew what it was to bluff, and that sometimes it was nothing more than a sign of a weak hand.
Like many who were short; many who were stout; and many who were of questionable ancestry; he paid close attention to his appearance.
“It is precisely because it is true, that you must not come out and state it,”
“Frankly, mademoiselle, I could not care less why it is that you want your marriage to be brief and your widowhood long.”
But you must understand that refinement is not compatible with haste.
If you want the Duke dead now, go and stab him. If you want to enjoy his being dead for a little while, and to see your orphan grow up, you will have to be patient.”
Nothing that relied upon so many people could ever work.
“I’m the only one of us who had a choice. And—never mind what the Calvinists say—no man is truly damned until he has damned himself.
For this alley was the womb at the center of the Mother of the World, the place where it had all started.
Here, there were no Dukes and no Vagabonds; every man was the same, as in the moment before he was born.
Versailles is like this window.” She swept her arm out, directing Eliza’s eye to a scene in stained glass. “Beautiful, but thin, and brittle.”
It is not whether this or that person believes you to be a murderer, or even can prove it, but whether they have the dignity necessary to level such an accusation.”
He was the only person in the Hôtel Arcachon who had the freedom to behave normally. For in the presence of the King, no one other than the King could be acknowledged.
“Our use of knowledge progresses through successively higher levels of abstraction as we perfect civilization and draw nearer to the mentality of God,”
The problem of the librarian is that books are multi-dimensional in their subject matter but must be ordered on one-dimensional shelves.”
“For every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme—of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme—pervaded by a vapor, a spirit, a fragrance that reminds us that it was the work of our Father. Which does us no good whatever, other than to remind us, when we despair, that there is an underlying logic about it, that was understood once and can be understood again.”
“If you are going to venture down this road of subdividing objects into smaller and smaller bits, you must somewhere stop, and stick your neck out by saying, ‘This is the fundamental unit of reality, and thus are its properties, on which all other phænomena are built,’ ” said the Doctor. “Some think it makes sense that these are like billiard balls, which interact by colliding.”
Ireland was a mentality, and not a physical place.
“To these people—” and he shoveled his hands across the Rue de l’Orangerie at Versailles—“we are what meteors, comets, sunspots are to astronomers: monstrous deviations, fell portents of undesired change, proof that something is wrong in a system that was supposedly framed by the hand of God.”
“I do not claim ’tis a likely plan, but ’tis my plan, and it gives me something to do.”
“I am ever in a delicate way,” said Eliza, “but men pick and choose the time to take notice of it, as it suits their purposes.”
When Men fly from danger, it is natural for them to run farther than they need.
“Clever stratagems are quite beyond my powers, but if it is rank foolishness you require, I have no end of it.”
a moving carpet of infantry, their wicked blades gleaming by moonlight, a geometry-lesson from Hell.
What, no coins in the bank? Does your purse hang as flaccid as a gelding’s scrotum?
What does it say of us that our commerce is built ’pon forms and figments while that of Spain is built ’pon silver?”
I say only that ink, once dried on the page, is a brittle commodity, and an œconomy made of ink is likewise brittle, and may for all we know be craz’d and in a state to crumble at a touch. Whereas silver and gold are ductile, malleable, capable of fluid movement—”
This was the world Drake had made, a world where power came of thrift and cleverness and industry, not of birthright, and certainly not of Divine Right. This was the Whig World, and though Drake would have abhorred everything about most of these people, he would have had to admit that he had in a way caused this Juncto.
“That is a Janus-like utterance, my lord, and for now I will prefer to look only upon its smiling face.”
searches after truth are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a great part of the pleasure.”
Natural Philosophy cannot advance without attacking theories that are old, and beating back new ones that are wrong, neither of which may be accomplished without doing some injury to their professors.
“His differs from yours in that it does not need to succeed—only not to fail. And I take that to be a more sound way of doing science than your approach, which is all-or-nothing.
we. But Daniel is right. We have failed. Our line was not long enough to fathom the depths on which we had ventured. It will be necessary to regroup, to start over again. We shall require time and money and leisure.”
He will be merely the most successful Natural Philosopher in all of history. Which is a better thing to be than a false Messiah.
“Pay attention, that’s all,” Eliza said. “Notice things. Connect what you’ve noticed. Connect it into a picture. Think of how the picture might be changed; and act to change it. Some of your acts may turn out to have been foolish, but others will reward you in surprising ways; and in the meantime, simply by being active instead of passive, you have a kind of immunity that’s hard to explain—”
