The Riddle of the Labyrinth Quotes

“After all, solving a jigsaw puzzle is no fun, if you know what the picture is in advance.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“A scholar’s worst enemy is his own mind. Facts are slippery things. Almost anything can be proved with them, if they are correctly selected. . . .”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“Though she is all but forgotten today, Alice Kober single-handedly brought the decipherment of Linear B closer to fruition than anyone before her. That she very nearly solved the riddle is a testament to the snap and rigor of her mind, the ferocity of her determination, and the unimpeachable rationality of her method. Kober was “the person on whom an astute bettor with full insider information would have placed a wager” to decipher the script, as Thomas Palaima, an authority on ancient Aegean writing, has observed.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“THROUGHOUT THE FIRST decades of the century, scholars were following Evans’s few publications on Linear B with rapt interest. Like him, they could only speculate on what the ancient language of the tablets might have been. Just one thing seemed certain: It wasn’t Greek.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“paucity”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“It has also been suggested that Kober’s doctors never told her precisely how ill she was. Given the low esteem in which the medical establishment of the period held patients—especially female patients—this, too, is possible.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“It is in keeping with midcentury taboo that a serious illness would never have been named, even in correspondence with valued associates. Nor does any of the published obituaries of Kober list the cause of death, also a customary omission then. Even her death certificate sheds no light on the question:”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“With civilization comes stuff, and with stuff comes the need to keep track of it.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“(Because Arthur had not mastered Latin grammar by the age of six, as his father before him had done, his paternal grandmother confided to Harriet her fear that the child was “a bit of a dunce.”)”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“On the morning of May 16, 1950, Alice Kober died at her home in Brooklyn, at the age of forty-three. The letter to Myres is her last known to anyone. Perhaps that is fitting: For all its pulsating rage, it ends with a vision of Paradise.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“road, I walked back at 9.45 in clear moonlight from the chief”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“numismatist.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“Every language glimmers with sparks of earlier ones. These sparks - a word, a place-name — are residual traces of languages spoken before, often long before, in the same part of the world. Though tiny, the sparks can illuminate a history of invasion, conquest, trade, and the wholesale movement of populations.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code

“AND SO THE STORY ENDS, bracketed by two architects: Daedalus, who built the Minoan labyrinth, and Ventris, who found the thread that unraveled the tangle of writing unearthed there.”
― Margalit Fox, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code