Academic Exercises Quotes

“If there’s a truth and nobody knows it, is it still true? Or is it like a light burning in a locked, shuttered house that nobody will ever get to see?”
― K.J. Parker, Academic Exercises

“Admiration is a wonderful thing. I like it the same way I like hundred-year-old brandy, and both of them come my way about as frequently. The other similarity is the way it goes to my head,”
― K.J. Parker, Academic Exercises

“All the memories, the knowledge, the perceptions, the experiences stored inside a mans head, all wasted in the time it takes a man’s heart to stop beating. It was the waste that appalled him. What a ridiculous way to organise things, he said, a man spends his whole life learning, acquiring information, both on his own and as part of a collective. Just when he’s starting to get somewhere, the buckets tipped out and all the good stuff is poured out onto the ground. He had a lot to say about that. He said that of all the evils in the world, of which there were rather too many for his liking, the greatest evil of all was love. It’s sheer spitefulness to allow mortals to love, because everyone dies, but the love they cause to be in others doesn’t die with them. Therefore love is the cause of the greatest sorrow, therefore love is the greatest evil.”
― K.J. Parker, Academic Exercises